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  I'm pretty disappointed in the weekend because I've had great success in the past at Sandown.

I REALLY had to scratch my head and think hard to recall the last time I drove in a race that was red flagged.

As I recall, it was at Pukekoe in New Zealand about six years when someone - I think John Bowe - hit the wall. Then there was my famous Calder crash that red-flagged the race in 1999.

But I don't think anyone can remember two red flags in the one event like we had at the weekend. That's pretty bizarre.

First, let me say there is nothing wrong with the Sandown track.  It is an excellent cricuit where I've enjoyed a lot of success and it's a great track to race on and to view all the action.

I think both incidents are basically the resut of driver error.  Garth Tander's crash was self-inflicted after having bumped into Paul Dumbrell.

From what I've seen, I think GT took offence to PD joining the track after his off-field excursion at turn one. The tyre blowout was the same result that Shane Van Gisberg had in the closing stages of Sunday's race.

If you bang doors with a car on its left-hand side, you can easily cause contact between the exhaust outlets and the rim or wheel, leading to a tyre blowout.

You'd think drivers would be aware of that. I've never done that and had a tyre blowout because of contact, but I have had tyres let go because of a design fault.

And you would think drivers would know there was something wrong with the tyre and slow down because they would have felt the steering pull one way.  The second incident was also driver fault. In fact, it was sheer stupidity and should not have happened.

We were talking about this on Sunday night. That is an exceptionally fast corner. The cars are going about the same speed as turn eight at Adelaide which is over 245km/h.

If you have contact at that point you are going to end up in the wall.  There are no problems with the track. Both incidents were driver induced.

We all know what the procedures are for a red flag but because it happens so infrequently there was still a lot of confusion about what to do.  Even after the first red flag on Saturday I didn't know on Sunday whether we would reform the grid like the previous day and have a standing start or do a rolling start.

When we stopped on the grid most drivers got out and some even went to the toilet.  Where I stopped was right opposite our pit bay, so I was able to go in and have a freshen up.

The restart on Saturday was basically the same as the real start only a lap earlier, but the Sunday restart was quite different for me because I was right back in the pack in 19th position.  There was a lot of car contact back there especially with PD stuck in behind me.

He'd started on pole and had been leading the race so he wanted to get past as soon as he could.  Our car wasn't too bad and we should have qualified up in the top 10 on the Saturday but I had troubles with traffic.

The Saturday race was ok, but I didn't have much speed in the beginning and at the end I was a bit cautious about the tyres even though the car was going better the longer the race went on.

On Sunday we qualified sixth, but then I got a terrible start with heaps of wheelspin.  We had better pace on Sunday in the clean air, but when I was chasing and got behind Greg Murphy it struggled to maintain balance in the turbulent air. Then I had an engine misfire at the end and fell back from Murph.

I'm pretty disappointed in the weekend because I've had great success in the past at Sandown.  It's a weekend I'd like to put behind us so we can focus on Homebush.

Mathematically I'm now out of the running for the championship, but at least we have the team championship sewn up now and we can all concentrate on what we have to do to get my teammate Jamie to clinch the driver's title.

Our team boss, Roland Dane, was delighted with the team championship. That was one of our aims of the weekend so we can go to Homebush with one less distraction for the team.

For me, my job will now be to get in front of James Courtney and stay there.  I'm not overly confident of leapfrogging Frosty into third position, but I won't be giving up just yet.

There are more than 100 points between us so realistically I can only grab third if Frosty has a really bad run and I don't think that's likely to happen. He's come good in the latter half of the season.

Sandown was the last of the sprint tyre for the season. We won't be using it at Homebush. That will be all control tyre.

I enjoy the Dunlop sprint tyre, but I would have preferred it was used the same way we did in Tassie the weekend before with one tyre in each race rather than one tyre in one race like we had at Sandown.  That would have mixed it up a little better.

The sprint tyre wore down a lot quicker at Sandown than it did in Tassie where we almost used it from start to finish.  Sandown certainly turned on the weather for us after such a soggy weekend in Tassie.

It was nice and warm but I didn't use the cool suit all weekend. Those long straights at Sandown give you plenty of time to cool down.  Some did wear it at the weekend, but I just love the heat. It doesn't worry me at all. I train in the heat of Queensland to acclimatise myself.

However, I'll use the cool suit for Homebush because it's a street circuit and they tend to retain heat behind those big concrete barriers.  We had reasonable cars at Homebush last year but we didn't have the results we should have because both Jaydub and I clouted walls.

I hit the third last corner but two corners back from there everyone was hitting the wall.  The problem is that anything off race line is very slippery from the rubber build-up.

I suppose we can't do much about that except to stay on the racing line and make the car nice car to drive and forgiving over the kerbs.  We need to go there with confidence and finish the year on a high, then refocus on next year.