IRWIN RACING driver Mark Winterbottom just wants to go racing.

WORDS: Richard Craill IMAGES: Irwin Racing

Quarantined in a Western Sydney hotel, not far from where he grew up, the former Supercars champion says he hopes Supercars takes the opportunity to race as often as possible in the next few weeks, while Victorian teams are isolated from family and friends at home.

Winterbottom and his expanded Charlie Schwerkolt Racing squad were one of the entire contingent of Melbourne-based Supercars teams who raced for the Victoria-New South Wales border prior to it’s closure on Monday night.

The Bathurst winner, former champion and veteran of more than 500 Supercars races told the On the Grid podcast, available later today, that the key issue for Melbourne teams wasn’t the state of the cars – it was the people.

“Honestly, we’d like to race this weekend. We’re here, cars are ready, and we don’t want to be sitting around for 12 days waiting for an event,” he said.

“We’re not disadvantaged from a preparation point of view or anything like that, it’s just the emotional impact on the people and that’s it. In 12 days time they’re going to be missing family, getting sick of hotel food, looking at these walls around you, that’s where you start to get your mental state down a bit.

“In terms of car prep, personnel we’re ready to roll.”

Winterbottom said he hoped Supercars became bold with the schedule over the next few months to fit in as much racing as possible while Victoria remained on lockdown.

“Ideally, I’d love them to say, ‘Hey, you’re on this weekend, you’re on next weekend, then you’re going to Darwin and you’re going back to back there’. I would like to do four races in four weeks.

“Or even the mid-week night race. While we’re here, lets race, do what we’re here to do, smash out a few rounds, get some racing on TV, get to Darwin, even get to Townsville and knock those ones over and we’re 5-6 rounds under our belt, plus last weekend, plus Adelaide, we’ve almost done 8 of the 10 rounds of the championship.

“That would help the guys as opposed to sitting around waiting.”

“I think the toll will come later,” he added, when asked about the performance of both team and cars.

“Queensland teams can stay at home, kiss their wife and kids goodbye, come down for three days and go home. That is normality and you perform when you’re used to normal things. We can’t blame this on performance… but use us while we’re here.”

In a wide-ranging interview with host Tony Schibeci, the IRWIN Racing driver detailed his dramatic Monday, that saw him isolated from the news of the day with his family ‘On the River’.

“..we go up there, we don’t watch the news – it’s actually refreshing to get away from statistics and negative news,” He explained.

“Hendo, the team manager, rang and said ‘hey have you seen the news’ and I went ‘nope. no idea!’”

Winterbottom also detailed the Covid-19 testing process Victorian crew members will undertake before moving into broader New South Wales society, the impressive performance of his Commodore to date this season, working with his new engineer and how Supercars badly needed the shake-up the Sydney on-track product delivered the sport two weeks ago.

“I thought the racing was getting stale, to be honest. Without being controversial I thought the racing in Adelaide was average. Watching back the replays the aero wash though eight was really big and the racing, I thought, needs a shakeup,” he said.

“To the flip-side, watching that on the weekend; I’ve never seen a race meeting as good as that..”

The full interview can he heard in full on this week’s episode of On the Grid, which goes live on The Race Torque and all reputable podcast players and applications later today – simply search for ‘On the Grid’, hit subscribe and enjoy.

This week’s show also includes Supercars’ deputy race director James Taylor, who speaks about his experience stepping into race control alongside Tim Schenken and Craig Baird and his own scramble from Melbourne to Sydney on Monday, and a whole heap more.