Crash was a bonus

• 

  Instead of just working on set-up for the sprint round, we were more interested in focusing on the coming enduro rounds.

My crash on the first day of testing for the Australasian Safari last year was a blessing in disguise.

It meant we had to rebuild the Colorado and it allowed us to go right over the car. That it highlighted the areas we needed to work on. The result was we had a bulletproof car and won the rally in our first attempt, leading all the way from day three.

I'm going back to Perth next month to defend my title and last weekend was my first test in the new Colorado rally car. We headed down to a cotton property at Moree and I'm happy to say there were no crashes. We now have a two-car team with former V8 Supercar driver Paul Weel in my Colorado while I'm in the new one with Paul's dad, Kees.

The cars are very similar but the new Colorado has some minor adjustments to suspension which makes it nicer to drive over high-frequency bumps and big hits like coming off a rut or big mound. Over 160km/h the new car is quite nice and settled. The original car will now get an upgrade so they are the same.

We did about 300km of testing all up and encountered no mechanical problems all weekend. The owner of the property carved out some tracks that had us on similar terrain to what we will encounter in the West Australian rally.

Speaking of the west I've been over there this week for a tool show which, as a qualified mechanic, is quite interesting. In the Safari, I have to do a lot of the work myself, so I always like to stay handy and up to date with the latest gear.

I've been doing a lot of testing in the past week with a day at Queensland Raceway last week before the round there next weekend. However, instead of just working on set-up for the sprint round, we were more interested as a team in focusing on the coming enduro rounds.

We gave plenty of seat time to Mark Skaife who will again partner me and Andrew Thompson who will partner my teammate Jamie Whincup. As usual Skaifey was totally committed and gave us some great feedback on car set-up and turned in some handy laps. He's getting quite comfortable in the car now and is far better prepared than he was this time last year. Skaifey wasn't far off my pace yet he was on hard tyres while I was on softs, so you can just see how close we're getting.

This is probably Skaifey's last Bathurst as he is now chairman-elect of the new V8 Supercar Commission which doesn't allow active drivers to be involved. It's in the back of my mind that this will be his last opportunity to race at Phillip Island and Bathurst, so I would love to go out on a high with him and finish his race career on the best result possible - a double victory. It's too far away to start talking about who will replace him next year, but I have been mindful about who is out there to replace him.