Motorsport: Richards strapped up and ready to race

Dodos are extinct and Kiwis can't fly but Jason Richards and his Aussie V8 Supercar team are proving the exception to that rule.

Richards and his Team Dodo Holden endured some low-flying rolls in a spectacular crash at the last round of the Supercar championship in Queensland.

The Nelson-born Kiwi emerged from the wreckage shaken, sore but undaunted - but the car, like its namesake, looked extinct.

The team have worked furiously in the meantime to put it back together and it will line up this weekend at Oran Park, Sydney, for the two 140km races in the eighth round of the championship.

Richards is still nursing a cracked rib but he will wear a rib protector to help to spread the load on his body when the car is at speed.

"It's a rib protector that's commonly used in go-kart racing," he said. "It will help share the load of the shock that goes through your body from the G forces and bumps over a bigger surface of my body and take some of it off the rib. But I won't know how comfortable I will be until I drive the car.

"I also have some ligament damage where it joins the vertebrae to the rib. Coughing and sneezing previously were very uncomfortable but the pain hasn't been too bad lately, so it's more of an annoyance than an actual sharp pain."

Last year at Oran Park Richards qualified fourth and finished eighth overall, and his best V8 Supercar round result also came there: fifth in 2003 for Team Dynamik.

One team with plenty of success at Oran Park is the Holden Racing Team. The works squad has never finished off the podium since V8 Supercars started racing there in 1993 and won seven rounds straight from 1996 to 2002.

But the man to beat may again be championship leader Marcos Ambrose. The Ford star broke the Holden stranglehold on Oran Park in 2003 and won again last season.