Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom ended Holden’s dominance in Perth with a clean sweep of the BigPond 400 after three V8 Supercar Championship Series rounds of what he termed as survival.

Winterbottom revealed a little of his team’s strategy for the year by declaring that the early rounds were not where they would make a move, instead pushing forward towards the endurance events with as many points as they can.

As it stands Winterbottom sits in third place in the V8 Supercar Championship Series after Perth local Garth Tander did enough with his second here to take the lead from former team-mate and HSV Dealer team’s Rick Kelly .

“I’ve always said that Perth was one step along the way,” Winterbottom said.

“We just tried to survive the first three events and fight while we can. You’ve got to make the most you can of each event and capatalise no matter how you might be travelling.”

Winterbottom had the perfect package in Perth , doing what Tander did last year by winning all three races. The importance of a good qualifying could not have been better illustrated although it was disproven by TeamVodafone’s Jamie Whincup who came from 22^nd to third.

“I’ve never had a car that was that good,” Winterbottom said.

“You could drive around for 50 laps, get out and feel great. Sometimes they just go this way for whatever reason. It happened in Bahrain last year and again here but with not much in between.”

Current Champion Tander was circumspect about his second and taking the Championship lead on a day when his team-mate Mark Skaife hung up the boots after a bad crash in race two.

“Happy with that,” Tander said. “We weren’t quite there all weekend but we battled away. Not so good for Mark but we’ll rebuild his car for Sandown and see how we go.”

For Whincup relief was the key word after his terrible and uncharacteristic qualifying.

“I’ve breathed a sigh of relief to be honest. From 22^nd I wasn’t sure how I would recover but I feel that third is a fair effort from there.”

Skaife’s day started badly with speculation of a possible retirement and it got no better when he was involved in a skirmish with Steven Richards on the first lap of race two, ending in a heavy hit into the wall.

Skaife had been pushed wide by Tander from the start and ended up on the slippery side of the track in no-man’s land when he contacted with Richards. It all came back to a poor start that put Skaife in the bad position.

“Yesterday I went through the same section of road alongside Garth with no troubles,” Skaife said. “Today going through there with Steve I was wide and the trajectory of the car meant that it was unavoidable to miss the wall.”

The V8 Supercar Championship Series resumes at Sandown Raceway in Melbourne on June 7-9.