Eyes on 2016

2015 V8 Supercars Champion Mark Winterbottom is already thinking about how he can defend the #1 next year.

This morning in Sydney his 2016 Bottle-O sponsored race car was revealed, shifting the focus to next year’s season and backing up this year’s achievement.

“It’s good, to put number one on the car and see what you’re running next year,” Winterbottom said.

“It looks a bit real because you now know what you’re going to look like and what your car’s going to look like – your weapon of choice for next year ... the motivation is there now to back it up and defend it.”

Winning by a margin of 238 points over Red Bull competitor Craig Lowndes, Winterbottom was awarded his first Championship trophy after pulling up short in previous years. His record has been good, finishing in the top five each year since 2006, but never quite good enough. Until now. 

“It’s a good feeling but still going to take more time to sink in when you go home, chill out with your kids and Renee [wife] and just watch some footage and all that,” he said. 

“Now with the #1 on the car it just feels complete to put the sticker on.”

For the man known as ‘Frosty’ it’s important to back up his success and come out of the gate strong when next year’s Clipsal 500 kicks off from March 3 to 6.

“You don’t want to win it and then turn up and go ‘hey, we’re P20’. It’s win it once, and really appreciate it, enjoy it, respect it, all that sort of stuff – and come next year and try and defend it. So that’s got to be the goal.

“I think our team will learn a lot from this year. 

“We’ve been good at times for six months or seven months and then you fall off – start bad and come off strong –we’ve never been good for 12 months. And then this year is just good belief.

“The team will really get a big step out of this … we’ve got proof in the number one now that we can do it and that’ll be a big boost to our team.”

Winterbottom can be proud of a strong year, recording the most wins – nine – and second at the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 despite dealing with electrical issues and a stop-go penalty.

“There’s times you’ve had a good car, so you’ve pushed and raced hard and really went for the wins. And there’s times when you didn’t have the car, finished fourth and people were criticising your fourth place finish,” he explained. 

“Our bad days were really good this year – that was the big thing ... winning races is awesome but some of those races – Bathurst, to finish second, was one of my highlights of the year.

“We were P20 with 45 laps to go – that would’ve been a 200-and-something point turn around, and we fought back to second.

“It’s not a win but some of the seconds and thirds we had were just awesome. It was a really good year.”

Taking the first ever win for Prodrive Racing Australia (formerly FPR) was also a big part, and Winterbottom described the prominent emotion of winning, after leading from Winton in May, as relief.

“You’re not as tense because you can finally say you achieved it,” he said.  

“Motivation is never going to die, you’re always hungry for it – you get one, you want two, you want three. It’s not that you expect it but you want more of it, because it’s a good feeling getting the number one.”