Pollies should come to V8 round

So I'd like to invite the new Premier to come to Townsville this weekend to see for himself how popular this event is with motorsport fans in the north.

I'll even strap Campbell Newman into my car for a hot lap to fire up his support if he comes long. 

There is some fear that the new government will axe funding for the event, but I think the north of the state is starved for this level of entertainment and it would be unfair for our fans to be deprived.

The 150,000 fans expected over the three days of the event come from far and wide. There is also talk of maybe Cairns or Mackay getting the event, but I don't mind so long as it stays in north Queensland. 

The Townsville fans will certainly be in for some acton with former F1 champ Jacques Villeneuve driving Greg Murphy's car while he's injured. I grew up watching him race and it will be great to rub fenders with him again. 

He got used to the cars pretty quick when he raced at the Gold Coast event a couple of years ago, so he only needs to familiarise himself with this rather unique track. 

Townsville is more like the Melbourne Grand Prix circuit because it goes around a park, but it's a semi-permanent track that is a hybrid of circuit and streets designed by Mark Skaife.

The biggest challenge for Jacques will be getting his head around how much kerb you can use in the corners. We have our cars pretty well set up for this circuit and pulled off a one-two there last year. I also had pole on the Sunday, so we're going into the round with some confidence. We also have some momentum behind us after Darwin where we halted the dominance of the Falcons.

But we can't be too cocky. It's difficult to get momentum, but it can be pretty easy to lose it. Last year we did well because we were the only team to use the loophole they had where we could re-use our soft tyres from the previous race. The team took the gamble and was quite smart about that, but it will be a level playing field now with the other teams working out tyre wear on the circuit.

Format wise, it's two 200km races with a shootout on the Saturday, a mix of hard and soft tyres like in Darwin and a minimum of two stops per race. The weather and the track conditions will be different to Darwin so we just have to make sure the car is good enough on the hard tyre. 

Hopefully it's nice and hot so FPR melt their tyres again, although I'm sure the teams will have done some research over the short break to get better soft tyre life. If we can qualify in the top five we will have a shot at winning and pegging back the points gap to the top three.