Whincup's engineer Cauchi looking for first Bathurst victory

Jamie Whincup, Paul Dumbrell and Red Bull Racing have all won the Supercheap Bathurst 1000 - Whincup four times over the years.

But for #1 race engineer David Cauchi, he is running a car for just the second time and the Mountain and, of course, would love to continue the crew's winning Sandown form and take his first victory at Mount Panorama this weekend.

"Very nervous!" the 30-year old told v8supercars.com.au about his first Bathurst engineering Whincup.

"Very nervous - but luckily there are still plenty of the same people around. PD and J-Dub are probably the best two drivers to have around here, so all in all, a little bit nervous but pretty confident with all the people I have around."

Whincup is leading the Championship and paired with Dumbrell is one of the clear favourites to stand on that top step - but day one didn't go as planned. A mechanical drama early on, paired with a lack of pace, ultimately saw Whincup finish 17th overall after the completion of practice yesterday, though he didn't bolt on green tyres in the final dash in P3.

Having finished seventh in the earlier session and Dumbrell 10th in the co-driver only run, it wasn't the same faultless form the team experiences at the first long-distance race in the Pirtek Enduro Cup.

"We had a difficult day," Cauchi said after the final practice session at Bathurst.

"The car is almost undriveable. They can't drive the car fast at any time, they don't have any confidence to push, so that means we're quite a long way behind than we would like to be.

"But we'll keep working away at it and see where we end up on Sunday morning. We still need to qualify well, but at the end of the day it's all about Sunday and making sure we have a good race car."

It was tough from the get-go in the special camouflage coloured car, with Whincup experiencing a reported tail shaft issue in the first outing.

"We had a mechanical issue with the car in the first session, so we spent most of that session in the garage ... we're just not really happy with the car. It's really out the window - the new surface has thrown us out a little bit so we're really struggling to find a balance.

"PD and J-Dub are really struggling with the car. We hadn't had a really good day so we didn't see the point of bolting on greens when the car wasn't very good anyway ... at the moment, it's not a car we want to go racing with for 161 laps around here."

The team will have worked through the issues overnight - and fans will know how good Red Bull is at bouncing back. But despite longer practice sessions at Bathurst, Cauchi warned there wasn't necessarily a lot of time on-track prior to the afternoon's 3pm qualifying session.

"It's tight. It's two sessions - one of them is for PD [the first session is co-driver only]. Luckily PD is a high quality driver so we still can rely on his feedback quite heavily. And then P5, and straight into qualifying. So there's not a lot of testing, even though there's longer sessions here, 45-50 minutes, they do disappear really quickly just because of it being a longer lap."

The relationship between Cauchi and Whincup has been under the microscope this season, but with the assistance of team boss Mark Dutton - who previously ran Whincup - they seem to have found a dynamic that works.

"Of course there's going to always be pressure engineering a champion driver, and an awesome co-driver in the number one car with a great team, so there's that there," Cauchi said.

"There's plenty of good people here who have been supporting me all of this year - Jamie himself has been helping me out a lot and Dutto so, we've just got to keep doing what we're doing, getting better every week, and that's all we can keep on doing. If we win races, we win races."

Cauchi said Whincup was a true professional when getting out the car after a tough day.

"He understands that unfortunately we don't nail the car every single time, every session, every weekend. It's part of the sport and he's very good at working hard when it's going good and when it's going bad as well. He understands that unfortunately we can't always be right on the money and we just have to put in the hard work and hopefully we'll still get there.

"He's fine in those situations, there's no point throwing all the toys out the cot and stuff. He's pretty good, he likes to get on with it."

Despite the challenges Mount Panorama also poses, Cauchi was confident that he, Whincup, Dumbrell and the rest of the Red Bull crew would be in a position to make the ARMOR ALL Top 10 Shootout after today's qualifying session and push for what would be Cauchi's first Bathurst victory on Sunday.

"I hope so - definitely I think we can be in the 10 still. But we've just really got to work at making the car nicer."

The V8 Supercars hit the track for the co-drivers practice session today at 9.30am.