Garth and Rusty’s excellent adventure

It’s 4.45am. You could be forgiven for thinking what the hell am I doing here? But then this is Bathurst. Everyone gets up with a little extra spring in the step when you’re at Mount Panorama.

The pitlane is lit up and teams are putting the finishing touches to their racecars. There’s plenty of coffee being consumed given the early start and the long day ahead.

Around 5am the cars are wheeled out. Through the darkness you can see fans getting set up for the day on the hill opposite pitlane. Rick Kelly is suited up and running on the spot before he jumps behind the wheel of the Nissan GT-R.

Rick will start the race for the team that won here last year.

Garth Tander arrives at Audi where I’ll be based for the day. The tall West Aussie walks in with a sense of purpose but his eyes aren’t fully open yet.

“I shutdown at 9pm and had a great sleep,” he says with a smile.

Tander will start the race in the #75 Audi R8-LMS GT3 that he’ll share with car owner Steve McLaughlin and 29-year-old Rene Rast. The German has been brought in to replace the legendary Craig Lowndes who suffered a broken collarbone in a motorcycle accident in recent weeks.

Lowndes has recovered enough to be sending texts to the team to wish them well.

Rast put the car on the front row in qualifying. He drew on Garth’s Bathurst experience throughout practice but Rene was also match-fit in the new generation R8 LMS having come straight from a GTD class win with Magnus Racing at the Daytona 24 Hour the weekend before.

Tander was happy to leave Rene in the car at the end of qual and the factory Audi driver delivered an impressive 2m01.84 second lap. That’s an average of 183.58km/h around this daunting, iconic 6.213 kilometre circuit. It’s also 3sec quicker than the best time round here last October.

Staggering!

As Tander pulls on a fireproof balaclava, his wife Leanne arrives to wish him well. I don’t recall her actually using the words “good luck”.

Instead she says: “Have fun out there.”

Leanne also asks GT if he needs any nutritional stuff before the start? A banana? Like a good Aussie lad he’s had a bowl of Weet-Bix already and declares he’s good to go.

Garth straps into the stunning $630,000 racecar. Long-time V8 Supercar engineer Eric Pender does a radio check.

Eric now works for the Melbourne Performance Centre team but he spent years alongside Garth and that familiarity is worth its weight in gold in terms of being able to fine-tune a car and to make the right strategic calls as the race unfolds.

Tander fires the car into life and switches the headlights on. The 5.2 litre V10 engine sounds different among the chorus of sports cars as they leave pit lane. Good morning Bathurst this is your wake-up call half an hour before the sun even comes up!

The start is frantic. There’s contact at Turn 2 between the Ferrari of ex-F1 driver Mika Salo and Nick Percat’s Lamborghini. Each points the finger at the other.

The incident is behind Tander so he doesn’t even lift but he begins to lose spots over the next couple of laps. He sounds frustrated on the radio by a lack of straight-line speed relative to the McLarens, Mercs and Bentleys. Under GT3 racing’s ‘Balance of Performance’ (BOP) formula, the Audi is superfast across the top of the mountain but it’s 10-14km/h slower down Conrod.

Still, there’s still 12 hours to go but some drivers are tackling it like a sprint!

Pirelli’s Simon Pool arrives to check on things. He says they should be able to get through the race on 10 sets of tyres and (depending on the weather conditions during the day) a set will last two full stints – perhaps 400 racing kilometres.

The Audi’s other strength is its fuel economy. On average a tank will last around 36-37 laps and as the day unfolds it could give the R8s an advantage over rival makes.

In chatting with other members of Garth’s Jamec-Pem sponsored team, they reveal a plan to put Steve in first.

It’s a driver change and fuel only during that first pitstop. Steve will do another run on that same set of race tyres. The fact they’re already at working temp helps driver confidence. Steve can lean on them straight away.

The sister Jamec-Pem R8 in the hands of the European’s Marco Mapelli, Christopher Mies and Christopher Haase has been running in the top two but on lap 51 a right rear tyre explodes, destroying some of the car’s bodywork and it limps back to pit lane.

The damage is too great and a 12-hour win eludes Mies, the reigning Australian GT champion. It’s thought that debris from Warren Luff’s crash in a McLaren may be the catalyst for the tyre letting go.

Tander never ventures far from the garage. There are regular chats with Pender about car #75. His racing brain is always thinking ahead. It’s a trait that reminds me of Jenson Button.

Even when he’s busy behind the wheel Garth seems to know strategically how to react as things unfold. He’s hands-on helping team-owner Steve with advice. Data analysis too -- something that began at a pre-event Phillip Island test in recent weeks.

“I’ve had to un-learn some V8 Supercar techniques here,” Tander concedes.

“The R8 is fast across the top of the Mountain…. Real fast! At the grate at Reid Park you’re in fourth gear in a Supercar. In the Audi it’s flat in fifth!

“Coming into the Chase typically you brake at about the 180-metre mark in the V8. In this car you wait until 105 metres.”

It’s a change of pace that requires a serious re-programming of the grey matter.

Rast does a massive stint mid race — over two and a half hours behind the wheel. The German steps out of the R8 with barely a bead of sweat on his forehead.

He and Steve have been challenged by tyre issues too — particularly the right rear. Some of the carbon-fibre bodywork on the inner wheel guard was damaged and may have contributed to a subsequent puncture.

With a slow trip back to the pits any hopes of a podium finish are gone. Still the trio drag the car back into the top 10.

Rene is more concerned about not being able to fight with their rivals during the day.

“The car is really well planted across the top but we can’t pass them there and they have a speed advantage on the straights.”

Again he’s referring to one of the BOP measures on the R8 for this year’s race. In 2015 the car was permitted to use a 49mm air restrictor. Now it’s trying to breath through 38mm and its at least 35kW down -- to counter the all-new chassis’ aerodynamic strengths.

Usain Bolt might have the most efficient running style in the world but if he can’t get enough air in the lungs even he won’t win a race.

Paul Ceprnich, a respected designer and engineer who has worked with BMW Motorsport in Australia and Schntizter in the early part of his career has the Audi shirt on this weekend. He doesn’t miss a thing in this pit lane and he’s puzzled by something else.

“We’re using the FIA spec refuelling rigs for these cars but other teams seem to have some sort of ‘hot-rod’ system that enables them to complete the refill faster.”

There is a mandated fuel flow restrictor so how this is possible wasn’t clear at the time of writing and will no doubt be the subject of further discussion. Time lost in pitlane in any motor race kills your chances.

Tander and Rast push hard in the final hours of the race. They’re on par in terms of lap times but it’s only an eighth place finish.

Kiwi Shane van Gisbergen gets a breakthrough win for Tekno Mclaren along with Jono Webb and Alvaro Parente. The Nurburgring based Phoenix Racing team, whose line-up includes Australia’s Alex Davison, is the highest placed Audi.

After a fight to get back on the lead lap they led for a time but just miss out on a podium in fourth.

There is some cause for celebration in the Melbourne Performance Centre pit though. The GT Motorsport team, also being run out this garage, stayed out of trouble all day and take the ‘Amateur’ GT3 class win. Greg Taylor, Barton Mawer and Nathan Antunes bring their R8 almost without a mark (despite a nose to tail on the warm-up lap!) home in sixth outright.

“I hope the BOP will be kinder next year,” Tander says.

He feints a smile but can’t hide his disappointment.

“We recovered two of the six laps we lost and there were some really satisfying moments in that final stint trying to match Rene’s times. It would have been great to share the car with Craig [Lowndes] given we have raced our whole careers against each other but never as teammates.

“It’s be nice to come back and do some more of this,” says Tander, clearly enamoured with the potential of the GT3 Audi.

Rast is now heading back to Europe and some testing in Audi’s LMP1 car but it won’t take much arm-twisting to bring him back to the Mountain.

Would he like to contest the Great Race one October in a V8 Supercar?

“I never miss watching it,” he says.

“That’s the dream… That’s the dream”.

Footnote: Greg Rust is a motorsport broadcaster who can be seen on FoxSports. Despite claiming it was his name on the side of the car there was no typo. It was Rast, not Rust.