Tyres and luck key to Darwin

…and luck with the safety car.

We're back in the north where Russell Ingall, Garth Tander and I are the only ones who have competed at every V8 Supercar round.

It's a special track for me. I won there in '96 and 2006 and twice in '07. The track is similar to Perth in that the tyres deteriorate quickly.

At Barbagallo it's because of the grit that blows on to the track, but at Hidden Valley it's more to do with the surface and the heat, although they tell me it won't be all that hot this year. Anyway, you need a car that looks after its tyres in Darwin. Making that all the more difficult will the set of soft tyres we have to use in Sunday's race.

It's the first time this year we've used soft and hard compound Dunlop tyres together in the one race, so that will mix things up for all of us. In the past the normal strategy is to start on a hard tyre and try to finish strongly on the soft set.

When to make the tyre switch is the million-dollar question. It will probably depend on safety cars.

A couple of years ago Alex Davidson and Shane Van Gisbergen got the timing right and got a huge benefit.

I'll be on the radio talking non-stop to my race engineer JJ (Jeromy Moore) to figure out what we do and how early we get on those soft tyres. The critical thing will be to maintain a good lap time for as long as possible and hold on to your tyres.

Wear on these soft tyres seems to be a lot higher than it has in previous years. We'd never run soft tyres at Perth before, but we were stunned at how quickly they ran out of grip. There is a fair bit of pit talk about whether this is a different type of tyre compound to what we are used to.

In the end, it doesn't matter. We all have the same tyre, so it's the same problem for everyone.

The other change this weekend is the return of the popular Top Ten Shootout. The fans love it. The Shootout really builds the tension in qualifying. I think it's a great element to the weekend and really spices things up. I've only had pole here once.

It's a tough track with close lap times because it's quite short. The long straight is critical to a quick time. You have to come on to the straight carrying loads of speed and try to slipstream someone for that extra tow.

It was great to hear that world touring car champion Andy Priaulx is confirmed for our team at the Gold Coast race this year. Last year he fitted in extremely well.

This time I'll obviously be talking to him about Le Mans after my first tastes of endurance racing this year. Maybe we can have a chat about doing something together in the future.

It was fantastic to see Audi win Le Mans at the weekend after two of their three cars were involved in a major crash.

What a thrilling finish; just 13 seconds to the first of the two Peugeots after 24 hours of high-speed racing.

I was a bit bleary-eyed early early this week after staying up to watch as much of the Le Mans as I could as well as catching Casey Stoner win the MotoGP and Mark Webber's third in the F1, both in appalling weather conditions.