Jamie Whincup: The Australian Michael Schumacher

In the sixth chapter of my Driver Spotlight Series, were I look at some of the best racing drivers who are still racing today, I look at one of the best touring car drivers in the world.

Jamie Whincup has competed in the V8 Supercars as a full time driver since 2005. He may not be well known around the world but I think he is one of the best drivers in the world.

He’s won an unprecedented seven championships, had a record 112 wins and record 79 pole positions. In a championship that’s separated by hundredths of a second, this is remarkable. Four Bathurst 1000 victories to his name as well as an incredible winning rate at places like Symmons Plains, Townsville, Adelaide and Queensland Raceway.

Whincup was spotted early in his career by a man called Garry Rogers and made his V8 Supercar debut at the Queensland 500 in 2002, before graduating to a full-time position with the team a year later. Rogers has gone on to recruit another Supercars legend; Scott Mclaughlin. But 2003 proved to be difficult for Whincup as he found himself dumped come the end of the season and only able to scrape together an endurance seat in the third Holden Castrol Perkins car in 2004.

He then landed a seat with Tasman Motorsport and showed signs of consistency with some solid results.

It was 2006 where his V8 Supercars career was about to take off. He won two of the championship’s biggest races: the Sunday race at the season opener in Adelaide and the Bathurst 1000 with Craig Lowndes on an emotional race weekend after the death of the great Peter Brock. One of Whincup’s greatest wins due to the occasion and it was Whincup’s first Great Race win.

Whincup finished just two points short of a maiden championship in 2007 as he lost out to “hardhead” Garth Tander. But, it was a good year. A first Sandown 500 win and a successful defence of his and Lowndes’ Bathurst 1000 title is something you can’t complain too much about. It was just the fact he got so close to having his hands on the championship.

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2008 was the first of Whincup’s seven titles. He started off the year perfectly by winning both of the races in Adelaide. However, a huge crash for Whincup in Hamilton during qualifying after contact with Todd Kelly meant he would miss all three races that weekend due to the damage the car sustained.

Yet he came back strongly in the second half of the season. Something that the series has rarely seen as a string of results at the very top of the field. Whincup took an astonishing 14 Top 2 finishes, including a third consecutive Bathurst 1000 later in the year and had the championship wrapped up with two races remaining. To miss a whole event and win the championship, convincingly in the end, is incredible!

“I wrote the car off at Hamilton in 2008 and pretty much dropped a round. We battled our way back through all year, so it was an unbelievable feeling to cross the line in that first race on Saturday,” he said after winning the title.

Whincup started 2009 with perfection. Four wins from the first four races was a psychological blow to his rivals and he gave himself a nice buffer for the rest of the season.  Despite bad luck in the endurance races and at the Gold Coast, the Victorian-born driver successfully defended his title.

Triple Eight Racing switched from Ford to Holden for 2010, a bold move. For Whincup it didn’t matter, he started 2010 exactly how he started the previous year with four consecutive wins. But some bad luck meant he was in a championship battle and it was James Courtney who snatched the championship in the final race of the season.

The penultimate race of the year in Sydney created one the classic moments in Supercars history. Torrential rain came from nowhere and all of the championship contenders crashed at the same corner and it was a battle to do enough laps to get some championship points. Whincup had too much damage and ended up with a DNF so he couldn’t rescue his championship.

Whincup was involved in a classic race on Sunday in the Gold Coast in 2010. He fought Shane Van Gisbergan (now his teammate) for lap after lap with a thrilling finish with Whincup ending out on top. One of many sensational moments that Whincup always seems to be involved with, even if he comes out not on top.

“I worked pretty hard and the Gold Coast is a pretty special event for me because it’s my home event. I wanted that more than anyone else and did what I felt like I needed to in a car that was running out of rear tyres at the end of the race.”

After falling short in 2010, the Triple Eight ace struck back with force in 2011 to win 10 races and take nine pole positions on his way to his third V8 Supercars Championship crown. He beat his teammate, Lowndes by just 35 points and became just the second man after Norm Beechey – but first in the modern V8 Supercar era – to have won the championship in both a Ford and a Holden.

The now 35-year-old then backed that up in both 2012 and 2013 with 12 and 11 race wins respectively to seal his fourth and fifth titles which put himself among the all-time greats in the record books.

He took a fourth Bathurst 1000 win in 2012  but this time he crossed the line in the car to win with co-driver Paul Dumbrell who has played his part in Whincup’s success. Earlier in the year, Whincup the another Adelaide race, one of his favourite wins in part due to the occasion. He said, “I’m not a spiritual person – my father passed away the week before, my good mate Will Davison is leading the race, I pass him with half a lap to go and take one of the biggest wins of the year.”

2013 was a time of change for the sport. The “next generation cars” were introduced, Vodafone sponsorship was replaced by Red Bull and new manufacturers in Nissan and Mercedes came into the sport with Volvo a year later. Yet we got the same outcome, 11 wins for Whincup and another championship.

2014 arrived and Whincup took a record breaking sixth championship. The standout race was the insane battle he had with Scott McLaughlin in Adelaide at the start of the year, the beginning of a bit of a rivalry with the Kiwi. Volvo made their debut to the sport and McLaughlin was in only his second season.

The battle was only for second place but the last lap was unbelievable. How one of them didn’t end up in the wall goes over my head and it is the definition of hard, fair racing. If you haven’t seen it, go and check it out. Words can’t really describe it. Even though Whincup didn’t come out on top, it showed how much he loves a good wheel to wheel battle.

The one weakness of Jamie Whincup is something that has only happened in the second half of his career and weirdly it’s the Bathurst 1000. He’s won it four times but hasn’t been victorious there since 2012.

Nearly every year since then, he hasn’t been able to execute when in a good position to win.

In 2013, Whincup and Mark Winterbottom did battle in one of the purest motorsport races you could ever see. The last 70 odd laps were completed under green flag conditions yet it came down to the wire. Whincup went for a move around the outside at Griffins Bend but couldn’t make it stick and had to settle for second. To be fair it was always going to be tough to overtake his then arch rival on the biggest stage of the year.

One year later he was in the lead but needed to save some fuel or else he wouldn’t get to the end without needing another pitstop. Despite multiple calls from his engineer over the team radio, David Cauchi, Whincup didn’t listen and pressed on setting personal best laptimes and not saving fuel.

Finally, he did listen but only with 2-3 laps remaining so he started to save fuel but had to do it in such an extreme way that Chaz Mostert overtook him on the last lap coming out of Forest’s Elbow in what has to be the craziest race at Mount Panorama. Had he listened and saved fuel in a more economical way (rather than saving massive chunks right at the end) Whincup could have won the race.

In 2015, a safety car came out when it was time for the final stops for pretty much everyone. Running in 4th place, Whincup ignored direct team orders to come into the pits so instead he overtook the safety car as he blazed around for another lap and was later forced to take a drive-through as a result which ruined his race.

In 2016, we got the one of the most controversial incidents in Supercars history. Whincup was to blame. He attempted to pass McLaughlin coming into the chase, but the two touched sending McLaughlin across the grass on the exit of the corner. He then tried to redress the situation by slowing right down to allow McLaughlin to get back ahead but disaster struck.

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Garth Tander was running right behind the two of them and tried to take advantage of the situation by overtaking the pair of them. but as he pulled out to pass Whincup, McLaughlin rejoined the track and ran into the side of the Tander’s car, knocking both drivers out of contention as Whincup carried on. Whincup received a 15 second penalty for his trouble, which would be applied after the race, though he never made up a 15 second lead and ended up in 11th.

Triple Eight (the team) appealed Whincup’s penalty but it was quickly dismissed by the Supercars National Court of Appeal.

Last year, Whincup was genuinely unlucky as he suffered an unexpected engine failure. How will Whincup and Paul Dumbrell fare this year? The Great Race is just a few weeks away.

Last season was Whincup’s greatest and finest championship win. He didn’t have the quickest car but he still won through consistency, limiting the damage when the car was poor and that unbreakable grit and determination handed his greatest championship win, albeit in highly dramatic circumstances. It was like Fernando Alonso in 2012, except Whincup managed to get his hands onto the championship.

He beat Team Penske and Scott McLaughlin after huge controversy with Ludo Lacroix moving from Red Bull to Penske and a big rivalry building up as Ford vs. Holden entered a new era.

This year, he’s been outclassed by his teammate, the flamboyant Shane Van Gisbergan, and McLaughlin has proved tough to beat early on. He’s more than two race wins behind and many experts have ruled him out of the championship fight already. Big points are still to be won within the next couple of months so you can never say never but if he does do it, it will be a bit of a miracle.

It’s the motivation and steely focus that makes Jamie Whincup so special. To come back year after year and perform at the highest level is not easy and only a few can do it. Lets not forget that he’s beaten teammate Craig Lowndes – who many contend is the greatest – in each of the last 10 of the last 11 seasons with the same equipment.

Whincup has won more titles than the likes of Mark Skaife, Dick Johnson, Ian Geoghegan, Allan Moffat, Jim Richards, Bob Jane, Peter Brock, Lowndes etc – in what many consider to be the most competitive era of Australian touring cars. He is arguably Australia’s greatest ever national driver. You just have to look at F1 as an example to see that Australia doesn’t have a massive history in the pinnacle of motorsport.

It’s a shame that Whincup doesn’t have too much international recognition and he could have gone international to do some GT racing or touring car racing but he has stuck with the traditional and exciting championship that is the V8 Supercars. He is without a doubt Australia’s best driver in the last dozen years, perhaps the country’s best ever.