Going the soft option

So strategy was always going to play a huge part in the outcome. As a team we decided to have two different strategies, obviously the ultimate sin for teams is to have both cars in trying to do a pit stop at the same time for ultimately the second car is always disadvantaged.

We opted to not start on the soft tyre where Jamie (Whincup) decided to start with it. The way we come up with that decision is basically the lead car in qualifying _ which was Jamie here _  has the priority, has the first option.

Another element of the race here was knowing the guys behind you that are on the soft tyre and when to look out for them because the speed difference between a soft tyre and a hard is almost two seconds.  The radio communication from the team to me was quite busy _  giving me information about who was on what.

From that we went about our normal strategy which was trying to split the race up into two thirds with a soft tyre in the mix. The last sprint to the finish was going to be on the soft tyre for us where we had great pace at the beginning but overtaking cars takes a bit of life out of the tyres.

We burnt up the rears and finished fifth.  We also had a little issue in the pit stop when one of a regular tyre guys fall sick and we had to replace him with a backup. Unfortunately he was not quite as quick as our regular guys and when they dropped the car as normal the front left tyre wasn't on the car.

We lost about six seconds in our pit stop just because of the mistake.  So if you look back we possibly could've finished fourth, third was probably a bit of a stretch.

Now it's two weeks to Townsville and we'll be driving up as we did last year.  So we'll be leaving mid next week with the caravan and the kids, the kids will be on holidays, and we'll be driving up the east coast.