Orrcon Ford Credit FPR Falcon driver Mark Winterbottom has started Queensland's Raceway's round seven by blitzing the field with the fastest lap in Friday's opening V8 Supercar practice.
The 26-year-old blue oval racer known as Frosty sizzled around the 3.1 kilometre circuit in 1 minute 10.6040s, the culmination of the steady progress made by him and his race engineers throughout today's two hours of preliminary competition.
Winterbottom jumped from tenth in the times to an unassailable first place in the final seconds of the session: “It is a good start to the weekend but the most important thing now is to match today's time, or better it for qualifying tomorrow,” he stated.
“I know the track quite well as I tested here for three years when I was driving for Queensland based teams early in my career and I've carried a lot of this knowledge across to FPR. There are still a couple of areas which I think we can improve on which should help me for qualifying tomorrow.”
Winterbottom was just over six hundredths of a second faster than rival Garth Tander, who is shooting for back-to-back victories at the circuit near Ipswich.
“We were very happy with the way our session went. The car was pretty good out of the truck, and we just needed to tune the car for what it needed, as it is the first time we have had the VE here,” said Garth.
“On our first set of tyres we went faster on lap 40 than we did at the start of that session, so that bodes well for a race package. We put some better tyres on the end there and just got pipped by six-100ths. So, I am very, very happy with the car.
“We made some changes to the car during that session – things we didn't get a chance to try last year – and they worked as expected. We know that there is going to be a lot of opposition from the Queensland teams, because they tested here recently, but they appear to have used all their good tyres there.”
Holden Racing Team duo, Todd Kelly and Mark Skaife rounded out the top four, split by less than five hundredths of a second in their Commodore VE's.
