McLaughlin rues end to hot streak
ONE small mistake stopped Scott McLaughlin winning his fifth straight Supercars race yesterday, but he’ll hope his title aspirations are intact.
Rick Kelly won yesterday’s race at Winton but he was gifted the victory by the Kiwi.
The championship leader drove superbly and had built a six-second lead over Kelly in his Nissan as McLaughlin looked like he was going to continue his hot streak.
However, a safety car came out when Tim Blanchard spun out with nine laps to go and the field bunched up.
McLaughlin’s Ford still had enough pace to hold everyone off, but he ran too wide at the first corner at the restart and everyone jumped on him.
Lying fifth, he was never going to pull out a risky overtaking manoeuvre on his team-mate Fabian Coulthard and had to settle on finishing where he was.
‘‘That little error at the end there cost us,’’ McLaughlin said.
‘‘I just didn’t have enough temperature in the surface of the tyre at the restart, so the win got away from us.
‘‘That was unfortunate, but we still took a big bag of points and the positive is that we now lead the teams’ championship for the first time this year.
‘‘We’ve got a fast car, and we’ll bounce back tomorrow.’’
While it was a disappointing day for McLaughlin, it was an emotional one for Kelly.
Nissan had announced earlier in the week that they were pulling out of Supercars at the end of the year.
After years of struggle for Kelly and his recently retired brother, Todd, it was ironic that they had their best result in a GETTY IMAGES Nissan this weekend.
‘‘This is better than winning Bathurst what we have been through,’’ said Todd, who is now the team’s co-owner.
‘‘What the boys have achieved today has been absolutely unbelievable, I will never forget it.
‘‘It just shows the calibre of these guys here. You couldn’t have been faced with more adversity and distraction in the lead up to this and they have dug deep to get the job done. The crew, the drivers, everyone is GETTY IMAGES just amazing.’’
Shane van Gisbergen started the race a lowly 14th, but his team ran a brilliant strategy. Instead of pitting early like most of the others, he stayed out there to well into the second half of the lap and continued to go faster.
He was the second to last driver to make his compulsory stop and then drove strongly again to finish third, one place ahead of Fabian Coulthard.
‘‘Once people started to pit, we stayed out and started to drive up to the next car and then the next one,’’ van Gisbergen said.
‘‘So that we had good pace in clear air. We just ran really long into the race and we were eventually faster than the cars who had new tyres.
‘‘It shows it was the correct strategy, we probably wouldn’t have chosen that strategy if we started higher up. We did make a big change before the race so we made some good improvements but we need to start better tomorrow.’’
Meanwhile, Jack Le Brocq made contact with Richie Stanaway on the opening lap, that led to the Kiwi spinning out.
It was a shame for Stanaway, who had qualified in 12th and was looking to have one of his best results of the season. He ended up 22nd, six places behind Andre Heimgartner, who had a quiet race.