Coulthard not giving up on Supercars title fight

The Kiwi went into his home round just 17 points behind leader Jamie Whincup, but has come out the other side of the weekend 176 points arrears with just 300 left on the table.

The main culprit for the points dump was Saturday's spectacular rollover, which resulted in a DNF for Coulthard and a long night of repairs for his crew.

On Sunday he finished fifth in the repaired Penske Ford, banking valuable points to stay in contention, but still losing ground to Whincup and Scott McLaughlin.

Despite now needing a lot to go his way on the streets of Newcastle, Coulthard reckons he's not giving up on his title hopes, and will fight to the end of the season.

"I'm still going to give it a crack," he said.

"We're going to a place that nobody has ever been to, that nobody has any knowledge of. I think it's all up for grabs.

"We'll give it a red hot go. If it's good enough it will be good enough. If it's not, we'll be somewhere near the top still.

"There's still lots on the line. You're going to have to take risks, it may work, it may not. We'll see what happens."

Coulthard added that it was his crew that kept him in the game at all after Saturday's carnage, praising the Penske mechanics for the late-night field repair that involved stitching together two separate roof turrets due to the limited spares possible to bring to an overseas race.

"The team did an amazing job. I said earlier that I'm nothing without my team," he said.

"These are the guys that worked super hard overnight. 4am they finished up here, they probably got two hours sleep at best. They've been running on caffeine, so I can't thank them enough.

"If you'd sat me down on Saturday and said we'd qualify in the Top 10 and run fifth, I'd take that any day of the week.

"The cars finished Sunday pretty straight, although there's a little bit of fixing to do from Saturday

"We can really focus on making these cars faster for Newcastle."