Jamie Whincup has used the Yas Marina 400 to signal his intentions to claim a third straight V8 Supercar championship, winning race two of the season-opening round in Abu Dhabi on Saturday night.

The 27-year-old Whincup returned to Holden after four years of driving for Ford with his team Triple Eight Race Engineering this season, but he didn’t miss a beat in Abu Dhabi, Saturday’s 4.06-second victory over Ford Performance Racing’s Mark Winterbottom making it a perfect two wins from two starts to open the 2010 campaign for the TeamVodafone driver.

“The car was bullet-proof, and we were sort of in control from the start,” Whincup said.

“We have five or six little issues that you can’t see from the outside that we’re going to have to improve before too long, but it’s all pretty good – I can’t believe I’ve won two from two.”

Ford’s Winterbottom, the pole-sitter in Saturday’s race, paid the price for a slow start which allowed Whincup a chance to take the lead into the first corner, and did well to make the podium after dropping down to fifth in the early stages. Ford’s Shane Van Gisbergen, the youngest driver in the field at just 20 years of age, finished third, setting the fastest lap of the race along the way.

Whincup’s back-to-back wins sees him take 300 championship points into next weekend’s second round of the 2010 V8 Supercar Championship Series in Bahrain, while Winterbottom (267 points) is second. Whincup’s teammate Craig Lowndes, who was fifth in Saturday’s race, is third in the championship with 249 points.

The V8 Supercars were one of five racing categories on show at the Yas Marina Circuit on Saturday. In the Porsche Middle East Championship, series leader Abdulaziz Al Faisal (Saudi Arabia) won his sixth race from eight starts when he overtook Saturday’s race winner, compatriot Salman Bin Rashid Al Khalifa, with a strong move on lap 10 of their 13-lap race. Meanwhile, in Chevrolet Middle East action, Australian Tarek Elgammal led all the way to win the first of two races by almost six seconds. The afternoon race was won by Elgammal’s compatriot Michael Patrizi, after the race one winner and a fast-starting Raed Raffii clashed on an incident-filled opening lap.

In the UAE GT Championship, German Rene Rast strolled to a 65-second victory in his Porsche GT3 Cup S machine, his comfortable win coming despite a mid-race safety car following a spin by Jonathan Simmonds (Aston Martin) that closed up the field.

Christophe Hissette was a beneficiary of a last-lap crash between front-runners Usmaan Mughal (Pakistan) and South African Jordan Grogor in the first of two Gulfsport Radical Cup races, with the Frenchman taking a five-second victory. The second race was won by Briton Thomas Bradshaw, who crashed out of the opening race of the day but recovered to win this afternoon’s 10-lap dash by four seconds.