For you Mum

Mark Winterbottom paid an emotional tribute to his late Mum June yesterday as the reality of his first V8 Supercars drivers’ championship victory sunk in.

But rather than speaking of her through tears on his slow down lap, Winterbottom would have much preferred to simply have had her waiting for him when he arrived back in pitlane. 

A single Mum, June raised Winterbottom and his sister Julie on her own and funded his early racing career.

She died in 2011 after a 26 year battle with cancer, two years before Winterbottom won the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 and four years before he claimed the championship at the Coates Hire Sydney 500 yesterday in his Pepsi-Max Ford Falcon FG X.

“She has been on my helmet all year and I’ve just felt she has been with me,” Winterbottom told v8supercars.com.au. 

“She was such a proud person and she missed Bathurst and she missed here.

“I would have just loved to have come in and given her a hug because she has put in as much sacrifice and effort to get here as I have.”

The Winterbottom family lived in a housing commission unit in the working class Sydney suburb of Doonside and June worked in a toll booth on the M4 freeway.

Typical of the sacrifices June made was spending the $250 she had saved for a new couch on tyres for Frosty’s Kart instead.

“Mum continued to sit on the (old) lounge. It had wood popping out of it, the carpet in our place was s**t, the walls needed painting, our cook top was busted.

“They're the sorts of special sacrifices parents make because they love their kids,” Winterbottom recalled in a 2010 News Limited interview.

Years later when he had become a factory Ford V8 Supercar racer Winterbottom was able to buy his Mum a new couch.

“She was a big part of my racing career,” he said.

“You just want to share it with all the people you love and that’s the one person that’s missing from being here.”

While June wasn’t there, Winterbottom was surrounded at Sydney Olympic Park by family and friends for the greatest moment in his racing career, including wife Renee, sons Oliver and Austin and his sister Julie.  

Winterbottom also paid tribute to his team, Prodrive Racing Australia, with which he has won the championship after 10 years together. 

He admitted there were times when he questioned he and the team would ever overcome Jamie Whincup and Triple Eight Racing, which have won six drivers’ championship in the last seven years.

“We have come close and we have been in an era of one guy and one team dominating,” he said. 

“You are getting older, you are not getting younger and there are young guys coming into the sport. There are lots of things going on. 

“You never probably doubt it but you question it a little bit. But the team has always re-signed me, and I have always re-signed with them and together we have said ‘lets not give up’.

“Sometimes you go ‘what’s different about next year, what’s different, what’s different?’ 

“And this year we finally got it.

“Ten years is a long time.”