LET’S go right back to December last year. Our team never got much of a Christmas holiday last year because they were busy building our race cars for this year. Then we hit the track and have been slogging it out ever since to get that number one plate again.

Now it’s almost here and it’s a great feeling knowing we are coming into the grand final with just 22 points to get. If you do the maths that means even if my mate Will (Davison) wins both races, I only need to get 28th position in one race to win the championship.

I’m fairly confident we can achieve that. It makes me especially proud of our team to have such a lead at this point in the series, considering what a topsy-turvy year it’s been with the unknown factor of the soft tyre rule, the changes that happened with the different format at Indy and then not going to Bahrain.

It seems they have thrown everything at us this year to disrupt our planning and make it difficult to run away with a points lead, yet we’ve managed to do it all the same.

While my first focus is to get those 22 points, the second item on the agenda is to get a win in Sydney because it’s going to be such an amazing event.

It’s the grand final of a truly national championship. My third agenda item for the weekend is the team championship. You would have thought it a bit far-fetched that we could win both the driver and team championships before the Perth round two weeks ago.

We were so far behind in the points, but we did a perfect job at Perth with two pole positions and two wins so now we’re actually one point ahead of HRT with a chance of winning the prized pair of titles.

Of course, the unknown factor will be the track. No one has even walked around it yet and there’s no computer game to practise on, so everyone is in the same boat. I’ll have a good look at the layout and come up with an educated guess on the lines, then when I get on the track I’ll confirm or amend them.

After that there will be a lot of going over the track in my head to get it right. From what I’ve seen it looks like a good track for passing. There are several places where the track is wide which gives a good opportunity for passing, especially turn one at the end of the main straight.

However, I’ve been so busy with promotional activities this week I haven’t had much of a chance to study the track yet. One of those promotional activities was the launch of our team calendar to aid the McGrath Foundation. It was a Vodafone initiative, it’s all for a good cause and it was a bit of fun. Some of the photos are a bit racy, but I was fairly conservative. I tend to concentrate on being a racing driver rather than being a male model but I was happy to take part, even though I was definitely the most modest.

I don’t think I’m letting the cat out of the bag when I say there was a fair bit of trick photography and trick lighting involved plus a fair bit of photoshopping afterwards.

It’s amazing what you can do with good lights. But I’d just like to say there was none of that with my pictorial.