Sandown Raceway: A lap with Marcos Ambrose.

Its time for the endurance meetings in the V8 Supercar Championship and first up is the Betta Electrical Sandown 500.

Stone Brothers Racing driver Marcos Ambrose won the race in 2002, and he talks us through a lap of the track.

This is a very exciting track because it creates no shortage of action. There are no high-speed corners. It comes down to 90-degree corners and long straights. I think the return of the 500km race format at Sandown has given us back a little bit of history.

While Sandown is not necessarily one of the toughest tracks technically, it still takes plenty to milk a good time out of it.

Basically the track is a couple of long straights with a few left and rights at each end. As you head down the main straight it is great to have a big grandstand on the right-hand side - it really adds to the atmosphere of the place.

The braking zone for the first corner is very bumpy and the smoother entry into the corner is actually off the preferred racing line.

This is a great corner and you can really attack it, but it is slower than you think and you use the kerbs on the inside and outside to balance the car.

You stay in third gear for the short-shoot up to a right-left-left combination - I try and straight line the car through the first part of this section, hitting the kerbs pretty hard. You then click down to second gear for the left-hander on to the back straight.

There is a small kink as you accelerate up the back straight, but there is nothing in this and you take it flat out. You hit top gear and about 260kph about half-way up the hill on the back straight - depending on which way the wind is blowing.

As you come up over the hill your brain is telling you to stop, but you need to keep going. There is Armco close to the right-hand side and this part of the track is mentally pretty challenging as you head into the left-hander.

You attack this corner in sixth gear to keep up your momentum for the following chicane - this is my favourite part of the track.

Again, you try and treat this as a straight line before reaching Dandenong Road Corner.

The hardest part of this is getting into the corner and you need to bounce off the kerb on the outside to get the car straight. It is then down another short shoot which has a slight kink mid-way.

The next part of the track is called turn eleven, but really it is a long braking zone rather than a corner.

You can make up a lot of time here by using the left-hand kerb, but you need to be careful not to grab a wheel.

You are then hard on the gas for turn twelve which seems to go on for ever on to the front straight. This part of the track is pretty bumpy and it is amazing how different cars can look going through this section of the track. So much depends on how you car is set up and how you have come through the corner before.

If you get everything right you should end up with a lap around the one minute and eleven second mark.