Ford Performance Racing's Steven Richards broke his Hidden Valley Raceway drought in Darwin on Sunday as team-mate Mark Winterbottom extended his championship lead in the V8 Supercar Series.
Richards and Winterbottom ran one-two for FPR in the third and final race of the weekend ahead of Toll Holden Racing Team's Garth Tander in third. Russell Ingall from Supercheap Auto Racing came fourth and Jim Beam Racing's Will Davison fifth.
Richards' triumph in the final race saw him take the honours for the Darwin leg of the championship series. The victory would have been extra sweet as he had been the fall guy in a comical second race.
Richards was leading when a stray Holden flag forced the deployment of the safety car nine laps from the finish.
It was Tander who benefited from the blunder, getting the better of Richards, whose Ford had a gear problem from the restart, and holding on for the finals seven laps.
With temperatures on track soaring into the mid-40s, a fired up Richards blasted off the grid with Winterbottom in the third race to snatch the lead from Tander, the FPR pair then holding rank throughout the final race.
"I'm absolutely rapt with today's result and I'm sure from here we're going to get consistently better," Richards said.
"I'm really looking forward to the next few rounds. I think they'll be absolutely critical for the championship because you'll have to be in that top five to be in the running."
"For me, it's how a team handles its defeats, not its victories, that makes the difference and this is the best team I've ever been involved with. We go away, assess and bounce back and if you can keep doing that you get a pretty efficient car.
Tander's win had allowed him to make inroads on Winterbottom's series lead. But Winterbottom's effort to finish second in the weekend's final race saw him extend his championship lead by a further six points to 58 over Tander.
"The car's straight, we've got a heap of points and the weekend has been great!" Winterbottom said.
"To be beaten by your team-mate is a pretty good feeling. We're going to have a great night tonight and it's going move us to a whole new level as a team."
Tander said: "Our pace was pretty good towards the end and Mark (Winterbottom) was making a lot of mistakes and locking up (tyres)."
"I thought we could pressure him into making a mistake but it wasn't to be and we came home third."
"The last three or four rounds last year were difficult and this year's going to be no different. The competition has stepped up again and whoever wins the championship will deserve it."
Jamie Whincup lost ground in his championship bid after finishing fifth and eighth in Sunday's two races. Whincup had been 62 points adrift of Winterbottom prior to round six but that deficit has more than doubled to 126.
"It was a tough weekend all round," Whincup said.
The team's other driver Craig Lowndes came fourth in race two but failed to complete the final event.
"It was very disappointing," Lowndes said. "We made a number of changes to the car between today's two races and I really felt that we had a handle on everything."
"I felt a slight vibration on the second last lap which escalated to a very big vibration and then