Kelly conquers heat
Todd Kelly scored the Holden Racing Team's first V8 Supercar round win since the Sandown 500 last year when he won the fourth round of the Australian V8 Super car Championship at Darwin's Hidden Valley race track.
Kelly followed up a second place in Saturday's race with another second and a win in Sunday's two 35 lap heats to head Steven Richards and Russell Ingall for his first solo round victory with the HRT.
Steven Richards second place moved him into the lead of the series. "If we can keep working a little harder, keep finishing races and gathering points I'm sure we will be up there somewhere," Richards said.
"We've got a lot of racing to come and there will be a lot of hard luck stories along the way. But having a different winner of each round is tremendous for the championship."
The other half of the HRT did not have such a good time. At first it looked promising when Mark Skaife and Kelly put in the two fastest times in Saturday's top ten shoot out to produce an all HRT front row for the first race.
Skaife's woes started on the last corner of the last lap in the Saturday race when he ran wide while leading the race and leaving a gap for Ford's Marcos Ambrose.
"It's not a move I thought he would make given his lead in the championship," Skaife said. "I saw him on the inside but just didn't think he would do it."
Ambrose does not ignore a chance to pass . "I went for it on instinct. I had no intention of going for a manoeuvre like that but the opportunity was there. That's the way I have raced my whole career," said Ambrose.
The result of Skaife being caught napping was the cars made contact, damaging Ambrose's steering and forcing Skaife off the track. Ambrose limped his Falcon across the line for third while Skaife dropped from first down to fourteenth place as Skaife's car also limped across the line and stopped just past the finishing line then he walked back to his team garage.
The Holden Racing Team complained to the stewards about the incident but they found that "The passing manoeuvre was executed within the rules."
Ingall who had benefited from the race one incident suffered in race two at the hands of Stone Brother's Racing team mate Ambrose in the first corner dropping him well down the race order . Things got worse for SBR when they made a mess of Ambrose's tyre change resulting in a drive-through penalty for losing a tyre in pit lane. So now both their cars had lost a significant number of positions.
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