Getting to the top of the Supercars standings is the easy part. Matt Payne is about to find out how the rest of it feels.
The 23-year-old Grove Racing driver arrives at this weekend's Perth Super440 leading the drivers championship for the first time in his career, 92 points clear of Broc Feeney after a win and two podiums in Townsville flipped a series that Feeney had led by 90 points a month earlier. Payne has nine podiums and three wins from his last 11 starts, making him comfortably the sport's most in-form driver.
"It's been a bit of a journey to get here," Payne told the Fox Sports Pit Talk podcast. "The last three or four years as a team we've really been gathering some momentum, but it's really good now to have taken that first top step in the drivers championship."
He is not treating the lead as an achievement to protect.
"I think everyone was pretty stoked here in the team to finally have the orange numbers on it," he said. "But by no means is the job close to being done. There are still so many races to go, and to go with that, there's enduro season and then there's finals season. There are so many different elements to come."
Two rounds of the Sprint Cup remain — Wanneroo this weekend and Ipswich next month — with victory in it worth a guaranteed Finals Series berth and 25 bonus points into the Elimination Final on the Gold Coast. Brodie Kostecki (187 points back) and Cam Waters (195 back) are still mathematically live with 630 on offer. Payne, who won the Enduro Cup last year but missed the Grand Final, expects the team he has displaced to hit back.
"We've seen it I don't know how many times, they've had a couple of bad races and then they come out swinging even harder," Payne told Speedcafe of Triple Eight. "So I'm sure they're going to work for it and find out whatever their issues are and fix those up."
"What's a bit concerning is that he's been complaining about the car being too unstable on the way to the corner, and then when you get to the corner it's got too much understeer," Skaife said on MotorRacing 360. "Now those two things, they do not go together. If you fix the stability and make it nicer to enter the corner, that will make the understeer worse. Especially when you look at the layout we're dealing with in Perth, they're big, long corners.
"When you've got understeer, if you've got a little bit of understeer, that's okay, but if you've got that amount of understeer you're in the corner for so long, that then transcends into lap time. That's a real negative."
Skaife is not tipping a runaway for anyone else either. Six different drivers have won the eight Gen3-era races at Wanneroo, Feeney the most successful of them with three.
"I actually think you might see some different winners over the weekend," Skaife said. "You've got a resurgent Cam Waters, you've got someone like a Ryan Wood who we know goes really well there, so does Mostert. You can't discount Anton [De Pasquale] either, because his performance is good and the Chev was good there last year."
Payne, who chased Feeney home in last year's Sunday race, is wary of the venue itself. "Perth is another one of those tricky Australian older tracks that has a lot of character and it's tough," he said. "You've got to have a slightly awkward sort of set-up to make it work really well. We've seen teams go there in the past and have a really, really strong weekend, and some that have a really, really bad weekend."
That character has a use-by date. Barring a future doubleheader, this weekend is the championship's second-last visit to Wanneroo before the sport moves into Perth Park, the 12-turn street circuit being built at Burswood and slated to open the 2028 season. Chaz Mostert toured the site this week and came away sold.
"The track layout is 12 turns. It's been noted as a little bit of a bullring and for me the passing opportunities look great," the 2025 champion told V8 Sleuth. "Every time we look at new tracks, we want to make sure there's plenty of passing opportunities and that it opens strategy for the race engineers as well.
"So I can't wait. I wish it was debuting today, but they have still got a little bit of building to do."
Practice begins Friday at 5:00pm AEST.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/paynes-first-title-lead-faces-wanneroos-penultimate-test). Visit for full coverage.*