A loss and a gong mark the week

The Order of Australia award is very flattering, but certainly comes as a surprise.

I'm just glad it recognises our sport as well as my work with road safety and charities such as the RSPCA.

I've been joking with people that they will now have to call me sir, but really it's not going to my head and I don't think I'll be adding the initials "OAM" to my name anytime soon.

On the down side, it was sad to see our association with Vodafone coming to an end as it gave us a close association with the McLaren F1 team. I hope we can continue to foster good relations with them in the future.

Our team principal Roland Dane doesn't seem too worried about finding a new major sponsor, even in these tough economic times. He's pretty confident, but he always plays his cards close to his chest so I don't know what he has in mind.

I'm more focussed on this weekend's round in Darwin than worrying about our sponsorship deal. I had two podium results there last year so I'm going into this round with some confidence.

We have the car set-up right, our qualifying is better this year because we are not having to over-drive the car to get good speed and I practiced a lot of race starts at the recent test day at Queensland Raceway, so I believe we're in better shape than we were this time last year.

The Darwin track is very abrasive and the weather is hot, so it will chew up the soft tyres very quickly. That places a lot of emphasis on getting our tyre and pit strategy right. Last year we did a reverse strategy with teammate Jamie Whincup to try to avoid double stacking in the pits and I imagine we will do that again this year.

In both races we finished ahead of Jamie with a third on the Saturday and we had the Sunday race in our grasp until a safety car came out and wiped out our 15-second lead over Shane van Gisbergen. He had the better life left in his tyres and was able to get away from us. That was just a matter of luck and you can't rule out that sort of thing from happening again.

It doesn't take much for a safety car to come out at Darwin because as soon as you run off the track you tend to start a grass fire and they have to get the fire marshals to put it out. Hopefully they've cut and watered the grass.

The Fords are going to be hard to beat as they go into this round with momentum behind them and some good results at Darwin last year. Not that our team hasn't been performing well, but the Holdens haven't been in the results this year mainly because HRT has failed to fire.

Garth Tander has had some bad luck, but he's still a force to be reckoned with. However, James Courtney just hasn't fired since he's been with HRT. I think the main issue is that he is struggling to bond with his team.

There is no doubt about his driving abilities, but the problem is he lives in one state and his team is based in another. I've tried that before and it just doesn't work. Part of our success is that we all live and work close together and have been able to forge strong team relationships.