R4 QUAL - Bright upstages Skaife with record lap
18/5/2002 18:18 (V8 Wire - Jason Whittaker) -
Holden Racing Team deputy Jason Bright has upstaged his impregnable teammate Mark Skaife to take pole position for the fourth round of the series at Darwin’s Hidden Valley Raceway.
The points discrepancy between the factory pair – a massive 601 – belies how evenly matched they are. Only a poor start to the season has robbed Bright of his chance to challenge for the title.
Tomorrow, he has the opportunity to prove what could have been. Hopes for a maiden championship crown have faded, but he said, "I just want to win races."
The Skaife juggernaut looked to be rolling on in qualifying. He clocked the fastest time, just ahead of Bright, in one of the closest sessions of the year.
But Bright blitzed the top ten shootout, slicing seven-tenths of a second off his best lap to post a time even shootout specialist Skaife couldn’t emulate.
The one-minute 7.85sec flier is the fastest lap ever recorded by a V8 Supercar at Hidden Valley.
Skaife’s still poised to take a stranglehold on the series from the front row, holding a 78-point lead over Greg Murphy, who will start from fourth.
Ford’s best hope, Marcos Ambrose was eighth after qualifying. But he was quickly back on the heels of arch-rival Skaife in the shootout, booking a spot alongside Murphy on the second row.
Sandwiched between the Kmart Commodores of Murphy and Todd Kelly was Craig Lowndes, reunited with his new Falcon for this weekend and looking to put a score on the board after coming close to a race win at Eastern Creek.
Underdogs the OzEmail Racing Team was outstanding, with both Brad Jones and John Bowe qualifying for the shootout.
Jones’ defiant podium stand at Bathurst last year was looking increasingly like a fluke. But with veteran Bowe leading the way, Jones today tuned his new-for-2002 Falcon into a formidable package to start in his first qualifying shootout.
“By having both of our cars running inside the top ten, I think it has established OzEmail Racing as one of the top Ford teams in V8 Supercars,” said Jones, who went on to clock the ninth-fastest shootout time, one behind Bowe.
“We were confident that we were making progress with both cars and there’s no better way to get rewards from the hard work we have been doing behind the scenes than get results.”
Outstanding, too, was 19-year-old whiz kid Rick Kelly. The Young Lion cub qualified 11th, just missing out on making his shootout debut.
Ford battler Glenn Seton’s 12th was somewhat encouraging, while Steven Johnson recovered from a damaging clash with Bowe in practice to qualify 13th.
Desperate title hopeful Russell Ingall finished 15th, five positions behind new Castrol Perkins teammate Steven Richards (tenth).
Two gruelling 100km races await the 36-car field tomorrow, when the temperature is expected to reach the same sweltering 37-degree high as today.
First, though, they most negotiate tonight’s 20-minute twilight race, which was due to start just after 5pm local time.
Qualifying results:
http://www.natsoft.com.au/cgi-bin/results.cgi?19/05/2002.HIDV.Q4
Top ten shootout results:
http://www.natsoft.com.au/cgi-bin/results.cgi?19/05/2002.HIDV.Q5
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