Jamie Whincup just needs to finish ahead of Mark Winterbottom on Sunday to finish him off.
Holden superstar Whincup’s fourth V8 Supercar championship looks to be 67 laps away.
His title lead will become unassailable if he finishes ahead of, or not far behind, his only challenger Winterbottom in Sunday’s race at Winton.
Whincup won race one on Saturday as fuel and a failed pit strategy foiled his Ford rival.
The Team Vodafone driver now leads the standings by 326 points and will secure the title before the final round of the series in Sydney if he leads by more than 300 points on Sunday night.
“I plan to do exactly what I’ve been doing. It would be stupid to change the mentality, change the way we go about our race,” Whincup said.
“We’ll obviously try to improve the car, and if we can do that, qualify well. The day’s pretty vital in the grand scheme of things.”
Winterbottom will be hoping for better after a promising start to Saturday turned to disaster.
He started on pole position, but lost out to Whincup at the start.
Then a first-lap safety car led Winterbottom’s team to immediately call him into the pits to change to soft tyres.
The strategy didn’t work, cost him track position he worked hard to make up, and the resulting aggressive fuel use hurt him at the end of the race.
The Ford Performance Racing car ran out of fuel on the final lap and he lost more points as Lee Holdsworth passed him for third place – Winterbottom only just crossing the finish line before the car stopped.
It could have been worse.
Winterbottom’s title hopes would have been extinguished entirely had the race not been shortened by a lap because of time constraints.
“I thought I was on for a podium but the car coughed as I came up to the line so to miss it by such a fine margin is cruel,” Winterbottom said.
“The good thing is we come again tomorrow and with a great car we should be confident.”
Whincup, 29, will join exalted company with a fourth title.
Only Dick Johnson, Ian Geoghegan and Mark Skaife have been five-time Australian Touring Car Championship winners, and Whincup would join Allan Moffat, Jim Richards and Bob Jane with a fourth title.