Not since Steven Richards and Greg Murphy in 1999 has an all Kiwi driver pairing won the great race, but there was no beating the expertise of SVG and Richie Stanaway around Mount Panorama today in what was ultimately a war of attrition like we haven’t seen in Supercars for sometime.
Images: Red Bull Ampol Racing and facebook
It wasn’t flashy, and it didn’t come down to a nail-biting battle of qualifying laps as we’re so used to, but it doesn’t matter because Shane van Gisbergen, Ritchie Stanaway and the Red Bull Ampol Racing Team engineered a flawless race to claim victory at the Bathurst 1000.
For the first time the Gen 3 Camaros and Mustangs battled the Mountain and the new super soft tyres battled the heat to create a very interesting contrast to recent Bathurst races. And from the outset, van Gisbergen in the #97 Camaro struggled to match pace of some of his rivals in qualifying.
Rather than focus on improving his qualifying speed against the blistering pace of team mate Brock Feeney or Championship leader, Brodie Kostecki, the Red Bull Ampol Racing team and van Gisbergen instead turned to tuning the car for race trim. To be fast, and more sympathetic on those soft tyres.
This is what ultimately won the race. With the heat torturing tyres in the early stints, Car #97 was relatively economic on its tyre wear. But it wasn’t just the tyre degradation that was a compounding factor this year.
All season the fragility of components in the Gen 3 cars has been a concern, steering arms and racks and gear linkages, among other gremlins have reared their head and of course over the gruelling 1000km race over the mountain these issues turned to heartbreak as the race progressed.
Bathurst Legend, Craig Lowndes was one of the first struck down with a an unfortunate gear selector mounting bracket failure. The base plate breaking mid race making gear selection impossible.
Fellow Kiwi, Andre Heimgartner, had his hopes dashed with a rare catastrophic engine failure on lap 68 while being piloted by co-driver Dale Wood.
And in the final stanza of the race, sitting in second with potentially race-winning pace, 21-year-old Brock Feeny saw his Bathurst dream disappear as his gear selector suffered a similar fate.
This took some pressure off Shane van Gisbergen who, after textbook drives from both he and Richie Stanaway all day, was leading Brodie Kostecki handsomely.
Kostecki and the Erebus Racing team had been the car to beat all weekend, laying down one of the greatest Top Ten shootout laps ever to claim Pole, but hadn’t been able to maintain that pace over the 161 laps. And with 40 laps to go was struggling with underperforming power steering.
But it was nervous times for SVG also. After replacing brake pads, the Kiwi immediately was complaining of a very long brake pedal. Thankfully, it wasn’t pressure related, rather the new pads took several laps to bed into the worn discs. But then the #97 car too developed a steering issue with a dead spot in the steering making it hard to be accurate, a potential race-ending issue around the unforgiving Bathurst circuit.
But thankfully, the Kiwis had enough margin to essentially nurse the car for the final 20 laps and get the job done. It wasn’t exactly ragged edge, but it was still a great win and emotional one for Stanaway, who despite having had success all over the world, rates this a career highlight.
“It’s been a childhood dream to win this race. It’s been incredible to be a part of this team. Teaming up with Shane, I knew we had a good shot, but you never know in this race.” An emotional Stanaway said post-race.
And it was special for van Gisbergen also, as he leaves the series that made him, and Mount Panorama behind next year to embarg on career in NASCAR.
“We weren’t the fastest car all week but we worked on the race car and what a feeling. Richie did a stellar job all day,” van Gisbergen said.
“It’s been difficult with this car, she was falling apart a bit at the end but we made it. This is the perfect way to say goodbye, but yeah, I’ll be back.”
The win helped van Gisbergen slash Kostecki's championship lead to 131 points with the Gold Coast 500 and Adelaide 500 to run in the 2023 season.
