Motorsport: Winterbottom top target in Perth

Mark Winterbottom, here with Scott McLaughlin chasing hard, says he's in a better position than this time last year so the confidence is high. Photo / Getty Images

FPR ace happy to have Kiwi-heavy top 10 in hot pursuit on favoured track.

The V8 Supercars are at Barbagallo, Perth this weekend for round five of their championship and Ford Performance Racing's Mark Winterbottom leads the early charge in the race for the title.

He was the man of the moment at Pukekohe with two race wins, and now has a 107-point lead over Craig Lowndes with Kiwi Fabian Coulthard hanging in there in third.

Perth has been a happy hunting ground in the past for Winterbottom with a clean sweep of wins in 2008 before he led the team to another sweep in 2012. "Perth is one of the places I really enjoy racing," he said.

"This year we head there in a much better position so it is nice to be racing somewhere I like when the confidence is up, so I am looking forward to the whole field chasing us. Barbagallo rewards good tyre life and importantly that has been one of our strengths this year."

It's not often it can be reported that all the New Zealanders in the series are sitting inside the top 10. As a group they have been the form drivers of the season so far, with Coulthard consistently collecting points, Shane van Gisbergen sitting in fifth, flying, for him, just under the radar and bagging points and Scott McLaughlin proving his flying brick Volvo can actually fly and is in seventh.

Leading Kiwi driver Coulthard is keen to get his push for a championship title firmly back on track after, by his standards, a very average Anzac weekend at Pukekohe where he struggled with grip and car speed.

"New Zealand was a bummer, big time," said Coulthard. "I can't wait to get going at Perth and this weekend we get to use the soft tyre, which we have been good on in the past [Auckland was a hard tyre allocation].

"We're looking forward to capitalising on that and get a few points. The track is very different to Pukekohe so hopefully we'll be okay and we'll need the car to be good straight out of the truck."

Van Gisbergen is enjoying himself in the Tekno Autosport single-car team and seems to have risen to the challenge of taking on the bigger multi-car teams.

He's kept his head down and made the most of the car. The team is steadily improving it and van Gisbergen feels things are heading in the right direction.

"We've been going all right so far this season and did pretty well here last season," said van Gisbergen. "Our car's a lot better this year and it's been quick as well and we're steadily improving it so we should be all right.

"The surface of the track is really abrasive. The stones are so sharp, and that combined with the heat and the sand is going to make it really hard on the tyres.

"You have to qualify well and not make it hard on yourself trying to come up through the field - it just ruins the tyres."

Volvo pilot McLaughlin continues to impress with his new car and the team seem to have given the young Kiwi a pretty quick machine, to the consternation of some in pit lane. However, you can only make the most of what you're given and McLaughlin showed he has the nous to use the car to its best advantage.

He had a strong weekend in New Zealand scoring two podium finishes and climbed to seventh in the drivers' championship. Now that qualifying is the key in the 2014 championship, McLaughlin will approach the task today in a confident mood knowing he has the best qualifier in the pack so far this season.

"I'm looking forward to the weekend in Perth," said McLaughlin. "It's always a tough round with high degradation on the tyres with hard and long turns. We need another points haul like in the last round so we can stay in touch in the championship. We need to consolidate and pull away from the people behind us.

"We have to qualify up the front as you have to these days in V8s. It's a different game today - you can't come from the back and finish in the top five."

The Perth 400 has two qualifying sessions and two races of 42 laps each today. The weekend ends with a final qualifying session and a longer race of 83 laps tomorrow.