Winton: Jack Daniel's Racing Friday report

RICK KELLY THIRD FASTEST IN WINTON PRACTICE

Jack Daniel's Racing driver Rick Kelly has set the third fastest time in practice today ahead of this weekend's sixth event of the 2010 V8 Supercar Championship Series at Winton Motor Raceway in rural Victoria.

Kelly posted his best practice result for the season so far aboard his #15 Jack Daniel's Racing Holden Commodore, happy that his car was fast 'straight out of the truck' at the 3.0-kilometre circuit today.

Brother and team-mate Todd Kelly was down the timesheets in 27th position today, with Todd one of the group of cars that did not use a new 'green' set of soft tyres today.

Craig Lowndes was fastest in practice at Winton today ahead of Shane van Gisbergen and Rick Kelly.

JACK DANIEL'S RACING QUOTEBOARD

RICK KELLY - #15 Jack Daniel's Racing Holden Commodore:

"We ran green tyres there and it's always a little bit of a surprise depending on tyre condition and depending on whether others got a good run," said Rick Kelly.

"We're not too confident just yet but it was great to roll the car out of the truck and be quite quick.

"We haven't changed a lot and we we've been confident in it from 'day dot' and that's what we've been trying to achieve all year and this weekend we've definitely been the most successful at that so far this year.

"We need to just keep that trend going for the whole weekend and qualify in the top five and finish in the top three.

"That's our aim and it's achievable definitely at this stage."

RICK KELLY - Post-Practice Media Conference:

QUESTION: HOW CONFIDENT ARE YOU OF CARRYING THAT SPEED INTO TOMORROW?

RICK KELLY: If I do a good job I'm very confident. When we rolled the car out for Practice 3 I was really nervous because the other guys in the other three cars, and (Jonny Reid) in my car for that matter, were not too happy with them.

So I was genuinely pretty excited when I went out and the car was nice and balanced and didn't have too much understeer in and oversteer out.

Around here that's a surprise for us and a treat. We are pretty happy with it.

At the start of the weekend I turned up with a printout of data from 2002 from a test day here and we ran a set of greens and did a 1:22.57 on a Dunlop hard tyre.

Even today with the improvements we've made with the cars and the soft tyre I'm not as quick as I was back then so I hope I haven't deteriorated that much over those years.

QUESTION: HOW DO YOU DESCRIBE THE DIFFERENT IN SPEED BETWEEN YOU AND TODD?

It's good for the confidence I guess (laughs).

Todd's been trying a fair bit with his car. Tony's still learning and still learning how to drive one of our cars. It's a very difficult track around here, particularly to get a good lap, you've really got to trail the car in a lot, particularly our car, to get the front to turn to keep the weight on it and to be gentle on the throttle out.

He's learning that fine art and it's difficult to achieve. He's on the way to doing that.

Bargs is also quite new to our team. I'm sure those guys will all do a good job on the weekend and move forward. They've had a tough run and a bit of bad luck. In saying that we're not setting the world on fire in car 15 so we need to just make that little step further forward.

Shane (van Gisbergen) made a point about qualifying being very important. That's something I haven't been any good at my whole career so hopefully we can turn that around overnight.

QUESTION: A SITUATION SIMILAR TO RUSSELL INGALL.

Don't compare me to him please (laughs).

QUESTION: WHERE DID YOU GO WRONG IN TERMS OF SETTING A TIME TO MATCH CRAIG LOWNDES?

It didn't go wrong as such. It went wrong on my fast lap. I made a mistake into Turn 10 and lost about a tenth and a half so I'm still not quite there.

At the point where it counted I messed up, which isn't good so I need to fix that for tomorrow.

I'm pretty comfortable. We'll aim for the top five for qualifying and I think that would be a good achievement.

QUESTION: YOU'RE VERY CONSISTENT, ALWAYS IN THE TOP 10 AND IN SIXTH IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP. ARE YOU STILL ITCHING FOR A WIN?

I really miss going home satisfied from the weekend. We're always finishing sixth and seventh and eighth and fourth. We are consistent and that is what you need to do to win the championship but it would feel good to get a few podiums.

We're not far away from it. With our fresh team we really needed to build confidence in the set-up and know when we have a particular problem, what we need to do to fix it.

And we're really there now. 'Swenno' (David Swenson -- Race Engineer, #15 Jack Daniel's Commodore) and I have a document in front of us now and when we have a drama we know that it's one of one or two things that we need to do to fix it.

It's really satisfying to get to that point with our team. It really makes it much easier and much quicker.

"You've seen a lot at the start of this year and last year, that we're not too good Friday, on Saturday we're not too bad and on Sunday we are going OK. So we need to move that Sunday to Friday and build up from there.

We're really starting to do that and achieve that. Rather than having inconsistent results in thirds and fifths and 10ths, we having consistent results from fourth to seventh and we just need to chip away at that and move forward.

We don't need to do anything too drastic, just get that little bit more confident with it and it's not far away.

QUESTION: RICK WE ARE ON THE SOFT TYRE THIS WEEKEND. WHY IS IT THAT THIS IS YOUR BEST START TO A ROUND SO FAR THIS YEAR?

It's because we rolled the car out of the truck on the money. We're a fresh team and the most miles we have done around a track are here at Winton. I hope that is going to be consistent when we build up experience at all the other tracks as well.

The base set-up we've had all year at all the tracks has been considerably better than what we had last year.

TODD KELLY - #7 Jack Daniel's Racing Holden Commodore:

"Firstly, Rick has had a great day today so clearly we are going to look at what he has run on his car today in terms of set-up," said Todd Kelly.

"He used a new set of tyres today so we need to look at how he used those to his advantage.

"We tried a lot on our #7 Jack Daniel's Commodore today and we've developed a good direction for tomorrow."

-source: kellyracing.com.au