Kiwi flier Scott McLaughlin is hoping to celebrate his 21st birthday with a win at the Skycity Triple Crown Darwin 400 at Hidden Valley Raceway on June 20-22.

However, McLaughlin, who marked his personal milestone with family and friends on the Gold Coast over the weekend, played down the perception the 1km Hidden Valley front straight will deliver his Volvo Polestar Racing S60 an advantage over the rest of the V8 Supercars field.

And he also acknowledged the success or failure of last week’s Winton test in terms of finding extended tyre life for the S60 won’t be established until the Super Sprint races are underway.

Tyre life is a big deal at Hidden Valley, which is regarded as the hardest on rubber in the Championship apart from Barbagallo Raceway, the venue for the Perth 400. The event will be conducted on a mix of Dunlop hard and soft tyres.

“We are going there to try and win,” McLaughlin told v8supercars.com.au. “We know we have a fast car.”

And a strong engine. The 5.0-litre version of the B8444S narrow-angle V8 developed by Polestar in New Zealand has had impressive speed from its debut at the Clipsal 500. Like every other engine in the category it has since gone through ballasting and centre of gravity adjustments.

But McLaughlin is unsure whether the long straight will especially suit the Volvo’s engine.

“I think it will probably fare for us pretty well … but our gain in our engine is a lot to do with the mid-range pull in the gears,” he explained. “So I think when we get to sixth gear we plateau a little bit, so it’s not the biggest gain. It’s more just going up through the gears. We will soon find out.”

And the factory squad will also learn more about tyre life, something that has proved hard to extend.

“Qualifying is pretty fast for us normally,” said McLaughlin, who has claimed three ARMOR ALL pole positions in 2014. “But looking after the tyres in the race could be a different story.

“We worked on tyre life quite a lot (at Winton) and it was good. But we won’t know on that till the race.”

Overall, the test day got the thumbs up from McLaughlin, as the team worked through a  long list of reliability, componentry and set-up issues as well as giving Pirtek Enduro Cup co-drivers Alex Premat and Greg Ritter a steer.

However, McLaughlin admitted he was unsure whether anything learned will directly translate to Darwin speed.

“We think we did. At the test day everyone is on different tyres and the track is changing, but I think from a driving point of view the car is a lot better to drive. Or we have learned a lot of stuff that is a tenth here or there.

“But at the end of the day we have been up the front so we just have to make sure we stay there.”

McLaughlin said he had no preference for co-driver, although he and Premat – who was his full-time team-mate last year – shared the #33 S60 with him, while Ritter drove #34 with Robert Dahlgren. Team owner Garry Rogers said he has yet to decide what the pairings will be.

“I do not know what is going on, what the plan is,” McLaughlin admitted. “But I will leave that up to the boss. They are both good enduro drivers I think. I know I will be in good stead whichever driver I get.”

He made a point of defending Frenchman Premat, who lost his drive at Garry Rogers Motorsport after two years of bravery, some speed and a lot of crashes.

“I had a bloke tweet me the other day and say ‘there goes your Bathurst chances’ and that gets up my nose a bit because he (Premat) was solid (at Bathurst in 2013), he was better than me, he was contesting for a podium place at one stage and if it wasn’t for a fuel filler problem he might have got there.

“I think he has a lot of potential.”

The team is expected to test again with its co-drivers before the Wilson Security Sandown 500 and make a decision after that.