The biggest news I’ve got this week is that the driver pairings for the Phillip Island and Bathurst endurance races have been confirmed. Cameron McConville and I will be driving together in the BOC car, while Brad Jones and Max Wilson will be driving the WOW racing car. I’m really excited about driving with Cameron. He and I have been driving V8s all year so I think we’ll make for a strong pairing.

Even though we’re on our break at the moment, I have still been very busy. Last Friday I once again headed to Winton to do a road track comparison of some cars for Motor magazine. I got the opportunity to drive the new HSV 427, the Ford GT40 Le Mans car and also the new Nissan GT-R four-wheel drive twin turbo V6, which is the new version of the Godzilla. That was really good, all three cars were absolutely beautiful and it’s pretty hard to split them and say which the best was.

I was really surprised by the braking on the HSV. It was a big car and big cars with lots of horsepower usually underperform a bit in the brake department. But the HSV was very good. The Nissan was awesome. It had everything you could want in a car – plenty of grunt and it handled really well. Four-wheel drive, twin turbo, V6, it’s just an amazing car. I don’t really do much of that type of thing but because we are on the break I jumped at the chance to do it. It was a lot of fun.

Also last weekend Brad and I took the show car for a few visits to Bunnings stores around our area. We went to Wodonga and then up to Wagga. It was great to spend a bit of time with Brad. With him retiring last year, we used to drive together and do a lot of that sort of thing, but we haven’t really had the chance this year, so it was a good to get out and have a catch-up.

Appearances like that are great because we get to meet people away from the track and all the stuff that’s usually going on there. It’s a lot more relaxed and we can actually have a talk to people. It’s always great to see the level of interest in V8 Supercars and people are always interested to have a chat and check out the show car. Even though it’s not our actual race car, it’s done up like one and looks pretty cool, so people like to see it and have a good look.

This particular time we actually drove the car up on the highway. It usually gets delivered but we drove it up to Wagga ourselves this time and we always get some pretty unusual looks on the road! If we were speeding there’s not much chance the police would miss us, we definitely have to keep to the limit.

On Tuesday we came up to Queensland where I am now for some driver training stuff. I was fortunate enough to bring my family up with me. It was Koby’s first flight but to Mish’s credit, she did a lot of hard work to make sure it was all smooth. The little man handled it really well and there were no dramas at all. He seemed to enjoy it  which is good to see because he’s going to have to do a fair bit of travelling to keep up with his dad.

On Sunday we’re off to Hamilton Island for some more driver training activities as part of the yachting race week up there. It’s an awesome atmosphere there at that time and there’s some serious partying going on in the evenings. Brad and I have been there before for it and it’s lots of fun.

So it’s a good chance to make the most of the break and just getting away from the southern winter and thaw out a little in Queensland is a good thing.

Until next week!

Jonesy

Well we’re on our six-week break now but I’m still very busy and there always seems to be lots of things to be done. Last Tuesday we had our debrief after the Winton weekend and we tried to get as much info out of that as we could. That was productive.
 
To be honest the [...]

Well I guess you could say it was a bit of a mixed bag of racing last weekend for me. Our Friday practice went quite good and in the first two practice sessions, when it was raining, the car was pretty fast and we were up in the first four. By the third practice session [...]

We’re off to Winton in Victoria this weekend. For us and all the Melbourne-based teams, it’s our test track so we’re all quite familiar with it. With Albury being just 50 minutes up the road from Winton it’s our actual home track as well.
 
We’ve had two test days there this year and my car [...]