An Interview with Mark Winterbottom 2015 V8 Supercars Champion

“It’s a really satisfying feeling and I’m really proud to have number one on the car this year.”

 After finishing within the top three six times and winning Bathurst in 2013 in twelve years of being in the V8 Supercars championship ProDrive Racing Australia driver Mark Winterbottom can now finally add a V8 Supercars Championship to his list of achievements.

Having a reliable and very fast car and driving consistently well resulted in nine race wins (including the Sandown 500 with co-driver Steve Owen), three pole positions and sixteen podiums which allowed Mark to finally break the stranglehold that Red Bull Racing Australia’s Jamie Whincup had on the championship title.

Mark is understandably pleased with the result and felt that one key moments of his first championship victory was at Bathurst where he came back from 23rd after a stop go penalty for a mistake in pit lane to finish the race in 2nd. “Bathurst felt like the one that really sort of cemented our position in the championship because of where we were to where we fought back that was a good result.” He also felt that winning both races at Townsville was good because it was 300 points at a track that’s tough on the car and drivers.

He heads into the 2016 season with a new sponsor, The Bottle O (who have worked alongside co-owner Rod Nash for 10 years) a change that Mark has enjoyed so far. “They do some really cool stuff, it’s a really fun brand and they have lots of fun, so off track it has been really good to be involved with them….. The green car looks really good, it’s completely different. I’ve had blue for 12 years and now you wake up and put a green shirt on. I just want to get good results for them because they are committed”.

With the change of race format in this year’s V8 Supercar series Mark feel’s racing will be more interesting as different strategies will be applied by the drivers and teams during the longer Saturday races. “Previously you used to qualify on the Saturday, get a good start and you would finish pretty much where you launched off the line. At least now you can strategize it and really make a good race out of Saturday. The lengths are a bit longer; I think it’s a lot better with the formats.”

Mark likes the other major change for this season, the fact that one of the changes that V8 Supercars made this year was to bring in soft tyres which allows for more passing opportunities when the tyres wear out. Both those changes will please most spectators who have been unimpressed by the “follow the leader racing” short races have provided fans.

The first round of the year at Adelaide providing testing conditions with constant rain in Sunday’s race resulting in very poor driver visibility. Mark said it was extremely difficult to drive in those conditions as you could hardly see the car in front of you. To compound the problem his ”car was aquaplaning in a straight line”. Fortunately the rain stopped and the track got better very quickly…. As prior to that he felt the track was dangerous, and it was only the introduction of the safety car which made the race safer in Mark’s view. He ended up making the top ten twice that weekend (ninth in race one and seventh in race 3).

So not an ideal start for the current champion but Mark felt the team had made improvements to the car in some areas from last year but had gone backwards in other areas. They aim to fix them quickly and learn from the experience so they “can maintain what they have learned and get back to the fundamentals and consistent form they produced last year and have a better and very competitive car.

We wish him luck and we are sure the defending champion will do everything possible to achieve his goal for this year which is to be competitive and have results that allow him to be constantly near or up the front that will hopefully help him to defend his title.