6
NEWS
MOTORSPORT: Sentiment and sunshine for the Great Race
Celebrations of 50 years of Bathurst camouflage how few cars are capable of winning on Sunday, yet the Great Race remains the one capable of producing surprise resultsIt’s going to take an X-factor to deny Triple Eight or FPR
There’s a huge emphasis on heritage in the lead-up to this Sunday’s Great Race – the Bathurst 1000.
It’s entirely appropriate as Bathurst has a very rich heritage. This is the 50th year of endurance car racing at the NSW regional city’s world-renowned 6.23km circuit on the public roads of Mt Panorama, but it’s not the 50th anniversary or 50th running of the Great Race.
The event’s origins were at Victoria’s Phillip Island but then it moved to Bathurst in 1963. Originally it was a 500-mile – or 800km – race, but was stretched to 1000km in 1973.
Many cars will sport retro liveries this weekend in tribute to some of the great cars and feats of the past.
The Ford Performance Racing Falcons – of Mark Winterbottom-Steven Richards (pictured) and Will Davison-John McIntyre – will be predominantly white with red and blue side stripes to celebrate the Allan Moffat-Colin Bond one-two finish in 1977 with Falcon XC hardtops.
The third FPR entry – with David Reynolds-Dean Canto in the seat – is paying homage to the first Falcon GT victory in the classic, and the first by a V8, by Harry Firth and Fred Gibson in 1967.
The Triple Eight Holden Commodore (pictured) of Craig Lowndes-Warren Luff will be in red and white livery similar to that in which Lowndes’ mentor Peter Brock scored a hat-trick of victories in the early 1980s. The late Brock finished with nine victories in the Great Race and remains the undoubted King of the Mountain.
One of the Dick Johnson Fords this year will have the Tru-Blu look of Johnson’s XD Falcon which so famously hit a rock in 1980, off the back of which he returned in ’81 to win a crash-shortened race.
Another pairing this week, Lee Holdsworth and Craig Baird, sharing a Stone Brothers Falcon, arrived at Bathurst in a replica of the Ford Cortina in which Bob Jane and Harry Firth won the first Bathurst in 1963.
There are also some commemorative stamps from Australia Post, a special 50c piece from the Royal Australian Mint and telecaster Seven’s programming includes a 30-minute special at 5.30pm Saturday of the top 10 Awesome Bathurst Moments. Awesome is a word made for Bathurst.
There have been so many great moments, great cars, great drivers at The Mountain over the years. But while the nostalgia in this 50th year is understandable and welcome it conveniently camouflages one big problem with this year’s V8 Supercar racing. That is that only two teams and four cars can win. Or have won in the 20 races so far.
They are, of course, the two Commodores fielded by Triple Eight Race Engineering and the FPR Falcons. It is a sorry reflection on other teams that in the final year of this two-decade incarnation of V8 Supercars they cannot break the stranglehold of Triple Eight and FPR. And they cannot use the excuse that they are concentrating on next year’s Car of the Future when the top teams are ahead on that front too.
Bathurst can produce surprise results but, as welcome as one would be this Sunday, it now would be unfair on Triple Eight and FPR that they not win, having set the benchmarks all year.
Forecasts for sunny weather throughout the four days, starting with practice Thursday and with only a late shower Saturday on the radar, increase chances of the favourites succeeding.
Lowndes is the modern master of Bathurst with five wins, is in superb form and has the ideal co-driver, Warren Luff. The move a couple of years back to prevent regular V8 Supercar Championship teammates pairing up in the enduros was much criticised and lamented, including by this author, but it must be said now that it has worked a treat.
Triple Eight’s other regular ace, Jamie Whincup, is equally well served in this department, joined this season by Paul Dumbrell in his first year out of full-time racing. Whincup made a couple of mistakes at last month’s Sandown 500 though and will need to be back to his best form this weekend. Bathurst is notoriously unforgiving.
In a decade as Ford’s factory team FPR hasn’t won a championship or a Bathurst, but this has been its best season. It set the pace through the early part of the championship and, while Triple Eight and particularly Lowndes have gained an edge again recently, FPR remains the main challenger. Winterbottom, in particular, and FPR need to jag a Bathurst win while V8 Supercars remain a pure Ford-Holden battle, before the arrival next year of four Nissans and three AMG Mercedes.
Ford’s main man for most of FPR’s existence, Winterbottom is counting on his team’s greater consistency and reliability to give him his best shot this Sunday.
If the Triple Eight-FPR stranglehold on success this season is to be broken Holden Racing Team and Stone Brothers must be the most likely to do it. It has been a year from hell for HRT and while its cars are still lacking the outright speed of the frontrunners they have solid driver pairings – Garth Tander and the rookie he won the Great Race with last year, Nick Percat, and James Courtney with Cameron McConville.
Triple Eight and HRT have won the Great Race nine of the past 11 years. Stone Brothers may be ahead of HRT engineering-wise this year but its three cars lack a proven Bathurst “matchwinner” like Tander.
There is no word yet on the next TV deal for V8 Supercars, but in any case this weekend is another mammoth effort for incumbent telecaster Seven and the series organisers’ own television unit. They will have 42 cameras on the track, another in a helicopter, four in the pits, a “fly-cam” covering 450 metres of pit lane and 72 cameras in 12 cars – as well as 36km (almost six laps of the circuit) of production cable and fibre.
The AFL and NRL have set the bar high in audience terms, with average audiences in the five major state capital cities for last weekend’s grand finals of almost 3 million and 2.4 million viewers respectively. The Bathurst audience dwindled last decade but there was a welcome uptick last October and the race should produce a five-capitals average above 1.2 million on Sunday, perhaps nudging back up towards 1.5 million on the back of the nostalgic lead-in.
As much as the V8 Supercar series has broadened in some senses over the years, perhaps it was David Reynolds who summed up the situation best this week.
“You’d rather win this race than the entire championship,” Reynolds said.
And maybe, if it’s not to be one of the four favoured cars taking the chequered flag first around 5pm Sunday, it might just be the third FPR Falcon.
“I think we (he and Dean Canto) are in the top three driver pairings in terms of outright pace,” Reynolds said.
The game at Bathurst these days is to be on the lead lap and among the top few at the time of the inevitable safety car in the last hour. It’s after that that outright pace comes into it.
Hard to imagine, on form, that cars 1, 5, 6 and 888 won’t provide the drivers on the podium, but maybe 52D – that number being part of the tribute to the victorious 1967 Falcon, in place of Reynolds’ regular 55 – will make its contribution. Then again, it’s Bathurst. There may just be a bigger surprise.
Bathurst driver line-ups here
V8 Supercar Championship standings here
Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site...
Share this article
Written byGeoffrey Harris
See all articlesOur team of independent expert car reviewers and journalistsMeet the team
Stay up to dateBecome a carsales member and get the latest news, reviews and advice straight to your inbox.
Subscribe todayRelated articles
Disclaimer
Please see our Editorial Guidelines & Code of Ethics (including for more information about sponsored content and paid events). The information published on this website is of a general nature only and doesn’t consider your particular circumstances or needs.
Please see our Editorial Guidelines & Code of Ethics (including for more information about sponsored content and paid events). The information published on this website is of a general nature only and doesn’t consider your particular circumstances or needs.
Contact
Advertise with us
Local marketplaces
International marketplaces
Scan to download the carsales app
Want more info? Here’s our app landing page
App Store and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. Google Play and the Google Play logo
are trademarks of Google LLC.