Darwin a special place for us

First is the fact that only a few of us like Russell Ingall and Jason Bright have driven at every V8 Supercars round since it started in 1998. That was back in my HRT days and I remember one year driving up from Melbourne HQ with a big transporter loaded with merchandise and stopping off at all the outback towns and meeting all the people.

A few years ago the Triple 8 team all rode motorcycles from Brisbane to the Darwin round. It was about 4500km in eight memorable days. It's a great to get out in the outback of Australia. We came into a small township on the west side of Cape York and we met Jimeoin the comedian in the middle of nowhere. Australia is a beautiful place and you just have to get out and have a look at it.

Darwin is important to me because I have aunties who live up there and it's always great to see them.

It's also important to our sport because it makes us truly national and there are few other national sports that include the Northern Territory. It's such a shame because the people up there are starving for sport and every time we go we get massive support from the fans. Almost the whole city turns out.

It was a courageous move for the NT government to back the original race and it paved the way for other states to support V8 Supercars. However, all of those are at temporary street circuits. This is at a permanent track facility and each year the government puts back a lot of the money it makes out of the event to improve the facilities.

The West Australian government has now got on track with supporting the Barbagallo circuit and we need more states to do the same so there is a lasting benefit to the people of their state.

This week I've been doing a lot of driver training and ride days with competition winners and sponsors at Norwell with Jamie Whincup and Andrew Thompson. It's another great little track and the headquarters for Paul Morris Racing. They've done a lot with the place with go karts, a skid pan and a new 4WD course they've just opened up.

It's been good to take my mind off the Nurburgring race of the previous weekend.

We still don't know if Warren Luff and I have qualified to race in any of the 24-hour races like Le Mans next year. Audi is focused on the next two endurance races at Nurgburgring and Le Mans and after that they will look into whether we are accredited even though we didn't race because of my crash in qualifying. Regardless of whether we've classified, we both want to go back and set the record straight because we had good speed and had the ability to get a great result.