Toll Holden Racing Team’s Garth Tander has won the battle of tyre management and fuel economy to claim the first leg of the Clipsal 500 Adelaide today (Saturday).

Tander jumped pole-sitter, TeamVodafone’s Jamie Whincup, at the start of the race, which began a battle that saw the lead swap between the pair on a number of occasions throughout the 250-kilometre race.

But it all came down to the final of four re-starts. Most of the front-runners headed to the pits during the safety car period, which ironically was caused by debris on the track from the Commodore of Whincup’s teammate Craig Lowndes.

In the confusion of trying to pit both of its cars, TeamVodafone forgot to change the front tyres on Whincup’s Commodore.

At the re-start Tander, who had changed all four tyres, was able to drive past Whincup, as was Jim Beam Racing’s James Courtney and The Bottle-O Racing’s Paul Dumbrell.

Whincup fought his way back to third, but was then forced to give up the final podium position – to a charging Lee Holdsworth of Fujitsu Racing GRM – as he had to conserve fuel to ensure he made the end of the race.

“In all the congestion we forgot to change the front tyres in the last stop and then we were really low on fuel towards the end of the race so we took the smart option to finish fourth rather than make another stop,” Whincup said.

Tander went on to win the race as Courtney was also forced to conserve fuel in the dying laps.

Following his disastrous results in the Middle East, Tander was happy to be back at the pointy end of the field.

“You are only as good as your last race so I’ll take that,” he said.

“There was massive determination for me coming back from the Middle East where we had very good car speed, but we certainly didn’t get the results that we had hoped for.

“The car has been very good all weekend. It was good this morning; my shootout lap wasn’t as good as it needed to be. It was clearly my fault that we weren’t on pole.

“We had a pretty good strategy; the car was pretty good when it needed to be and we looked after it when we needed to.

“It turned out to be as perfect a day as it could have been.”

Tander said it was important for his team to get a good result in Adelaide.

“We are still the same core group of people who won the Teams’ Championship last year; we have been saying that we had good car speed but we never got to show it in the Middle East,” he said.

“There are a lot of smiles in the garage at the moment, but we know that we there is still a lot of work to be done. From a championship point of view we just need to battle on and hopefully by the end of the year we will be in the mix, so hopefully results like that will keep the momentum going and the morale up.”

Tander believes that his poor start to the series in the Middle East could actually have helped to take some of the pressure off.

“We need to be careful that we don’t forget about the Championship altogether, but it is not our main focus at the moment,” he said.

“I certainly have one eye on the Championship but that’s only 20 per cent of our focus at the moment; it’s important to win a lot of races.”

Courtney was pleased to be on the podium considering his lowly qualifying position of 17th.

“I wasn’t too happy when we came out of qualifying, so we went the other way (with car set-up) and it turned into a jet during the race,” he said.

“We need to do a good job tomorrow and go one better, but Garth was pretty quick today in that last stint on new tyres. He took off once he got past Jamie and I had to conserve fuel.”

Holdsworth thanked his crew for giving him a strong car and the right strategy to get on the podium.

“We had a great strategy and I had to run conservatively at the start… (but) from about three-quarters into the race I could go all out to catch these guys and I had a very good race car and it just kept getting stronger and stronger through the race,” he said.

Whincup still leads the Championship from Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom – who had a poor race today which turned pear-shaped when he got involved in an incident with Jim Beam Racing’s Steve Johnson – and Courtney.

Top 10 Championship positions

Jamie Whincup Commodore 720
Mark Winterbottom Falcon 585
James Courtney Falcon 558
Shane van Gisbergen Falcon 510
Lee Holdsworth Commodore 501
Craig Lowndes Commodore 495
Rick Kelly Commodore 428
Michael Caruso Commodre 384
Paul Dumbrell Falcon 378
Steve Johnson Falcon 365