Rick Kelly: Title a long shot now.

Rick Kelly has admitted that it will be a 'struggle' for him to get back into contention in the race for the 2008 V8 Supercar Championship Series title now, following a tough weekend at Queensland Raceway.

Kelly, who qualified 14th in his HSV Dealer Team Holden, finished eighth in race 1 on Saturday, however he failed to finish in the first race on Sunday after getting caught up in an early incident. That left his car with extensive damage and unable to finish.

Although the team banded together and were able to fix the #15 car in time for the third and final race, and he fought back from 26th to finish 13th, he still only salvaged 104 points from the round.

He now lies 174 points off Jamie Whincup in third in the V8 Supercar drivers' standings - and 382 points off the current leader, Mark Winterbottom.

"It was a bit disappointing not to finish race 2. Our aim is to be consistent even if we can't win the race and we were unable to do that. In the scheme of things we have been pretty lucky with incidents over the past couple of years and it was probably our turn to have a bit of bad luck," said Rick.

"It caught us out a little bit, we made a good recovery in the last race. We lost a couple of spots in the shuffle of pit stops but I guess it was pretty reasonable given we started twenty sixth.

"It is going to be a real struggle for us to get back up towards the Championship lead now. We are going to have to make the best of the rest of the season and hopefully things will go our way towards the end of the year but it is a long shot at the moment."

Paul Dumbrell meanwhile didn't have much luck either in the other HSV Dealer Team entry. He finished 11th in race 1 and was 11th again in race 2.

However in the final race he only managed 20th after he was turned around by Steven Richards early on.

Dumbrell was not impressed: "It is very disappointing; I got turned around by Steven Richards in the last race. He seems to be involved in a few incidents with our cars lately and I am very disappointed. I have just been to the stewards to have a look at the vision and it is very black and white," he continued.

"Whilst we weren't turning the world on fire this weekend we were certainly making some solid progress. We are going to our home test track - Winton Motor Raceway - now, we have recently had a two day test session there and I am looking forward to transferring some of this speed and consistency we have had into some solid results there."