The 2015 Supercars champion popped up with a second place in the most recent event of the season at Hidden Valley, where he delivered Team 18’s first ever race win, 12 months earlier.
Winterbottom reasons that it is hardly a case of simply being Darwin specialists, and he had more reason for optimism after Friday on the streets of Townsville.
That was because the #18 Chevrolet Camaro was only 14th on the timesheet in the opening session but wound up third-quickest at the end of the latter.
Asked by Speedcafe if it was encouraging to be quick today off the back of Darwin, Winterbottom replied, “Yeah, for sure.
“That was one of the big goals, to come here and be competitive.
“Because, you know, Darwin, people think you run last year’s set-up [but] it was so far different to last year’s car, and I thought it was a lot better this year than last year.
“But, you don’t want to be just good at one place, you want to obviously come somewhere else… and it rolled out with different strengths and weaknesses to last year.
“We were really slow last year actually, but in the race, we had good pace, where I want to have a good quali car and then be able to adapt it to a race car.
“So, I think we’re so far advanced on where we were last year but the competition is so tight. These two guys [Cam Waters and Jack Le Brocq, first and second respectively in Practice 2] were three tenths down the road but, that next little group, half a tenth or a tenth can be 10 spots these days, so you need to make sure you’re on it.
“For us, we’re starting to understand it more than and Dave [David Reynolds, team-mate] are working really well together, and all the engineers.
“So, it’s a good test, we’ll see how we go tomorrow, but we did go from 14th to third today and we haven’t been able to do that previously, so I think that’s a good sign.”
Reynolds could only manage 16th and 15th in the two sessions, but that is because he and Winterbottom operate in such a way which means they can take two vastly difference paths in practice.
“There’s nothing between drivers, really,” declared ‘Frosty’.
“Like, when you go directions, you get the cars close, and you’re within half a tenth of each other and normally team cars are side-by-side.
“So, they’ll look at our set-up from that and adapt it like we looked at his at Taupo and literally bolted it in.
“But, the good part is, at test days and stuff, everything is correlating really well, it’s really open, all the set-up sheets are working well.
“There’s no games, there’s no nothing, it’s very open.
“So he’ll bolt what we had but I didn’t really love what I had, so I’m going to try and adapt it a bit more.
“But, he’ll be up there, he’s really good on the street tracks, he’s probably one of the benchmarks and I’m sure tomorrow he’ll come out firing and he’ll be up the front.”
Qualifying for Race 13 of the season starts tomorrow at 10:15 local time/AEST.
