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Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom insists he’s over last year’s Bathurst nightmare and ready to set Mount Panorama alight in tomorrow’s top ten shootout.
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Winterbottom looks in great shape to secure a second successive pole at the Great Race, topping the charts in qualifying today ahead of tomorrow’s one-lap dash to determine spots one through 10 on the grid.
A year ago he led the Bathurst 1000 with 13 laps to go before he made the worst mistake of his career, overcooking the turn at about 200km/h and careering across The Chase, narrowly avoiding a collision with eventual winner Craig Lowndes.
“I’m over last year,” Winterbottom said today.
“Last year it burned pretty badly but you move on. There’s always highs and lows in motorsport. It’s not burning anymore. I won’t do it again.”
Winterbottom clocked 2mins: 07.19 seconds in his very last lap, with Holden’s Jason Richards a surprise second-quickest, 0.041s back.
It has been a horror year for Richards and his four-time Bathurst champion teammate Greg Murphy, the New Zealanders sitting a respective 18 and 19th in the standings.
But Richards said there was still time to turn their season around.
“They say if you do well at Bathurst you’ve had a good year and I still think that holds true,” he said.
“The car is awesome, it really is. It just encourages you to go fast.”
There weren’t too many other shocks in the session and all the heavy hitters will be involved in the shootout.
Ford’s Jamie Whincup was third-fastest in his first-ever qualifying attempt at the mountain, despite being a two-time champion at Bathurst.
He and teammate Craig Lowndes are shooting for a historic third straight Bathurst title and the more experienced Lowndes has handed the qualifying honours to his young colleague for the first time.
“Craig and I are extremely happy with how things are going,” Whincup said.
“It was quite a tough session actually, in the second half an hour the track conditions changed and there was a bit of a threat of rain happening so we went early, we weren’t game enough to leave it late.”
There was a nasty incident in the day’s earlier practice session when Team Kiwi Racing’s Chris Pither T-boned Holden driver Paul Weel.
Pither walked away and Weel is expected to be cleared of any serious injury but the pair will take no further part in the weekend, with both cars suffering extreme damage.
Weel, 29, had to be extracted from his Commodore, experienced some lower back pain and was airlifted to Westmead Hospital as a precaution.
The accident occurred near the McPhillamy Park area of the circuit, when Weel made contact with a safety barrier and slid sideways onto the track and Pither slammed into the driver’s side door.
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