HRT.com
Toll Holden Racing Team star Mark Skaife has dismissed the “home track advantage” theory ahead of this weekend’s V8 Supercar round at Winton Raceway, suggesting"a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing” when it comes to setting up modern racing cars.
Meanwhile Skaife’s teammate Garth Tander, locked in a battle for the championship lead with Ford’s Mark Winterbottom, said he remained unfazed by the 122-point margin to his rival. “It’s no drama, speak to me after Bathurst,” he said.
Skaife, a five-time V8 Supercar champion, said recent history showed a Queensland-based team had won the past two trips to Winton in North-East Victoria – where all Victorian-based teams including Toll HRT test – while Victorian teams have triumphed in the past three rounds at Queensland Raceway, where the Queensland teams are based.
The Toll Holden Racing Team may have logged many thousands of kilometres in testing at Winton in recent years, but Skaife has warned his team against being too reliant upon the reams of data it has gleaned.
“The Queensland teams winning at Winton and Victorian teams winning in Queensland shows both the test circuits don’t really give you much, you don’t pop out the end with a massive advantage,” he said.
“It is one of those ones where, I think, sometimes a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. You try to predict where the track is going, rather than just race. Sometimes you make better decisions when you’re not trying to predict what the car might do, based on previous visits.”
“We go to Winton quite a lot and we know the place changes, particularly in the afternoons. There is a lot of change in the track as the day goes on. If you try to predict that, you make more problems for yourself in some ways. It is a weird phenomenon that the interstate teams can basically go and beat the home teams, it’s very strange.”
Skaife said the introduction of the new control tyre two rounds ago would throw another x-factor into his team’s planning. “Even though it is our test track, it’s not much use testing if you don’t test with the right tyres,” he said.
“As it is you go to the track on a very level playing field which has taken a lot of the home track advantage out as anything we previously learnt there, given that the tyre is different, can’t be used.”
Tander agreed the Toll Holden Racing Team needed to approach Winton as just another track.
“Winton’s our home track, but it’s also the FPR home track, while Triple 8 have been very strong there the past couple years,” he said. We’ll be strong and the HSV Dealer Team will be strong also, so I think amongst us all it will be a ripper battle.”
Cold weather and showers forecast for the weekend could replicate the conditions of the Sandown Raceway round earlier this year, but Tander said he expected the team to respond well if wet racing conditions prevail at Winton.
“It’s a good opportunity for us to show we don’t struggle in the wet,” he said. “Last year it was wet and we were very fast, so I don’t believe it’ll be an issue. If it is, I’m looking forward to getting out there, getting miles under our belts and getting on top of things.”
“It’s almost like the calm before the storm, the last sprint round before the enduros.”
