Whincup: Championship comeback still ‘realistic’

Jamie Whincup has declared he is still in the hunt for a record eighth Supercars title despite Scott McLaughlin widening his points buffer in Darwin.

McLaughlin took a cleansweep of the three CoreStaff Darwin SuperSprint races last weekend to boost his advantage over Whincup to 177 points at what could well be the halfway point of the championship.

The Red Bull Holden Racing Team driver is not about to concede, however.

“Oh, 100 percent it’s realistic [to still win] but to make up points you need to have a faster car and I need to drive the car faster as well,” Whincup told Supercars.com.

“We can’t expect to take points away from a team that’s just lapping faster than what we are, so our whole focus is to try to go faster.”

Whincup has once before run down McLaughlin, in that unforgettable 2017 season finale.

“Yes, it’s been done before. Not for a while though, those guys have taken the grand trophy the last couple of years so it would be nice to be in the fight to get it back,” he responded.

It’s been well documented just how successful Whincup has been on the streets of Townsville: winning 10 of 23 races run at the Reid Park precinct.

Asked why it’s been so good to him?

“I get asked that a lot. How do you answer that?

“It’s a home state round, that certainly helps. I do enjoy my time up here at Townsville.

“They’re good people up here, they love the event, we get embraced, the weather is good.

“So I always feel good before the race weekend and I generally get the most out of myself over the race weekend and when I get the most out of myself, generally the car is as good as everybody else’s and therefore we have a result.

“As I always say, it doesn’t guarantee anything for this weekend but yeah, we’ll go in and put our best foot forward and see what we can do.”

As he notes, it hasn’t all been glory in Queensland’s north… “I’ve had some tough ones up here.

“I’ve had a brake line get pinched early on and we lost rear brakes, we’ve had the crash last year.

“Even last year on the Saturday we were leading the race but just didn’t quite have the tyre life and got done by Scotty [McLaughlin].

“Garth [Tander] passed me late in a race here as well, so we’ve had some heartache, we’ve had some fantastic results – they roll in as one.

“All in all, it has been a happy hunting ground.”

Supercars on-track action at the NTI Townsville SuperSprint begins with a 20-minute rookie-only practice session at 9:20am.