Volvo vows to bounce back from "shocker"

Scott McLaughlin and Wilson Security Volvo Polestar Racing have vowed their "shocker" of a start to the V8 Supercars Championship will not stop their tilt at the 2015 title.

McLaughlin exited the weekend's Clipsal 500 just 18th in the drivers' championship after suffering a several mechanical issues and falling foul of officialdom.

He is already 165 points behind championship leader James Courtney in the Holden Racing Team Commodore VF.

"What can you do, I am not the sort of person to dwell on these things," McLaughlin told v8supercars.com.au. "You just have to get on with it, you just have to take the hits.

"Obviously it's not the best start, but I am not going to let my head drop after the first race. Nothing will knock me down or the team.

"But it sucks."

The 21-year old, who made it clear over the summer that winning the drivers' championship is his 2015 target, was taking some solace from the fact that three different drivers won the three races and there was plenty of variety in each top 10.

"Obviously there is plenty of water to go under the bridge yet," he said. "So looking at the Sunday's results and the whole weekend, I don't think anyone is going to dominate.

"I think it is going to be a pretty mixed bag of results all year, so hopefully we are up there again."

The pace of the Volvo S60 V8 was also encouraging, with McLaughlin able to qualify in the top four for all three races.

However, he failed to make the start line for race one after the oil pump failed on the warm-up lap. Then he was judged to have jumped the start in Saturday's second 125km race and received two separate 10 second penalties, which meant he ended up finishing ninth.

On Sunday in the 250km race three his drink bottle popped out on lap two and his S60's alternator failed, forcing him to drive much of the race without a cool suit or helmet fan. He ended up in 18th place four laps down after twice having to change battery.

He had to be dragged from the car and treated for heat exhaustion after the race.

"I could hear ringing in my ears, I couldn't hear Krusty (Engineer Richard Hollway) that good and the road was blurry and stuff," McLaughlin said of the closing stages of the race.

"So every time I came into Turn Eight I was braking at the 150 marker, when we normally brake at the 50 marker. And all the time I am blinking abnormally. It was just the weirdest feeling and when I got out I was spent.

"All I wanted to do was get it home for the boys who had worked so hard for me doing engine change (between races on Saturday).

"At least we finished, we didn't score zero points and you never know that could pay dividends further down the track."

Hollway, who is also chief engineer of the factory Volvo outfit, was blunt in both his assessment of its Clipsal 500 performance and what the plan for the Melbourne-based team was going forward.

"We had a shocker," he admitted. "Obviously we have made mistakes and had things go wrong, but in reality you keep doing the things you have been doing.

"It's not like we spent all summer down the beach. We worked hard on things like tyre life and when it (the car) was going it was fast.

"So you have to believe you can win, but it's the person who makes the least mistakes that wins the championship and we are making way too many."

Hollway admitted being caught out by the alternator failure, which had been a problem with in the first half of the S60's 2014 debut season. However, leading into 2015 the team believed it was an issue that had long been fixed.

"It surprised us, we thought we were on top of that. Obviously we have done a lot of kays; done Bathurst and Homebush and Indycar, all sorts of races with reasonable kays (without a problem). But it certainly brought us down again."