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Hero or heartbreak: The title implications that will make Bathurst even bigger
The race every Supercars driver wants to win has an unhealthy obsession with breaking hearts. There can only be one winner for any race, but defeat in the Bathurst 1000 seems somehow crueller and more devastating.
Drivers ply their trade for 1000km, for six hours or more on end, as the culmination of their entire season. It’s the one they all train for, the one they all expect to be best prepared for. Everything is put on the line at this punishing circuit, but for every co-driver pairing that fulfils their dream there’s another 20 or more with hardluck stories of what could’ve been.
The fine line between pleasure and pain, between glory and anonymity, is what keeps crowds coming back to Mount Panorama year on year to see who can add their name to the honour roll dating back to 1960 and who will be forced to return and try again. But for the prestige of this single race, there’s no divorcing it from the battle for the championship, for which this is round 11 of 14.
It’s the final weekend before the finals series that will whittle down the field to just four contenders and, on the last Sunday in November, the Supercars champion. There isn’t a greater race of greater stakes and greater consequence at a greater circuit in Australian motorsport. Mount Panorama Circuit traces its history back almost 90 years to a Great Depression employment scheme designed to create work in regional New South Wales.
Bathurst mayor Martin Griffin had seen the road’s potential as a racing circuit, but the government denied a request for funding. Rather than give up, he went back, but this time with a cunning plan to pitch the road as a scenic tourist drive that might attract people to the region to take in the tablelands views atop Mount Panorama. PODCAST: We catch up with Supercars points leader Matt Payne for the countdown to next weekend’s Bathurst 1000 next weekend.
|The plan worked, and £30,000 later — around $3 million in today’s money — Griffin was one of several local dignitaries assembled at Walter J McPhillamy Park as state MP Eric Spooner cut the ceremonial ribbon with a pair of gold and silver scissors. Fittingly he would later have a corner named in his honour — Griffin Bend, a perhaps unintentional reference to his bending of the truth all those years ago.
The dirt road carved into the mountain is fundamentally the same as the one drivers will race on today, but for it to host the country’s most prestigious race, it needed the help of circumstance. The Armstrong 500 — miles, or around 800km — claiming to be the world’s premier production car salon race had first been run in 1960, but just three years later the track had degraded so severely that the event needed a new home.
Mount Panorama was available and already proving itself with several feature races from a variety of categories, including twice hosting the Australian Grand Prix. The event moved to Bathurst in 1963, and it’s been there ever since, becoming a 1000km race in 1973 and a round of the Supercars championship in 1999. Peter Brock’s unprecedented and surely unmatchable nine victories between 1972 and 1987 put him ahead of the rest.
Even Jim Richards and Craig Lowndes’s remarkable seven victories apiece somehow seem tame compared to the record of the man they call Peter Perfect.
“What we’ve got is … a dynasty that will never be repeated — nine wins,” Supercars legend and six-time Bathurst winner Mark Skaife told MotorRacing 360. “It’s just extraordinary. He just was one of those guys that had this incredible innate ability to grab the thing by the scruff of the neck and just do amazing things with cars.
Skaife is equal fourth on the winner leaderboard with Larry Perkins and Garth Tander — the latter having retired only last season, after winning the 2025 event with Matt Payne — but ahead of Steven Richards, Bob Jane, Harry Firth, Allan Moffat, Greg Murphy and Jamie Whincup with four apiece and Dick Johnson and Shane van Gisbergen with three each. Brock also has the record for most poles, with six, though the track record has inevitably dropped since.
Today Chaz Mostert is the mountain’s fastest man, with his best lap of 2m 3.374s in 2021 so far unmatched. He went on to convert that pole to his second Bathurst triumph, this time with Lee Holdsworth, to ensure his place in Supercars history long before he claimed the 2025 championship.
“To win one, I think it’s the heartbreak that you have — that the mountain gives you — to get one taste of success. “It’s all the heartache of Bathurst, the stories that you have, that ‘I should have won’ — when you do win it, that’s the story. Payne and Tander won one of the more memorable editions of the Bathurst 1000 last year.
There was the fact that they started 18th on the grid, seemingly well out of contention in a field of 27 cars. There was the fact that a mid-race deluge completely shook up the order, wiping out some of the sport’s more experienced and better fancied pairings. There was the fact that Payne didn’t take the lead until the final five laps — and, even then, didn’t cross the line first.
James Golding took line honours with co-driver David Russell, but he was penalised 5s for bumping Cooper Murray off the road in a battle for the lead. With light fading and visibility poor, drivers earned their money putting on a spectacle. But amid the slipping and sliding, Payne and Tander were the cleanest performers and deserved winners.
Payne has kicked on this season to become arguably the favourite for championship glory, but this year he has a new co-driver, with Will Davison as his wingman. It’s a formidable combination, with three Bathurst triumphs between them, but the endurance form guide suggests he’ll face new threats this year.
Chaz Mostert’s sensational win with Fabian Coulthard at the curtain-raiser Bend 500 has raised expectations considerably — and they were already elevated for his Toyota marque after a competitive Sprint Cup. In dire conditions in Tailem Bend, Mostert and Coulthard started 11th but kept their noses clean while others around them slipped and sailed off the road or into each other.
The Toyota package, with its B-spec engine — crucial for engine-sensitive Bathurst — is clicking at the right time, and just like last year, Mostert is peaking for the run to the finish. Brodie Kostecki, meanwhile, has taken the last three pole positions in a row to establish his credentials as the sport’s fastest single-lap driver at its most difficult track.
With long-time co-driver Todd Hazelwood by his side, with whom he won in 2024, he’s an ever-present threat at Mount Panorama. The way the Supercars season is structured means Bathurst, the biggest single weekend on the calendar, is also decisive in deciding which drivers are entitled to contend for the championship. But unlike last year, when four drivers were at risk of missing out on the finals, this year there’s just one competitor on the bubble.
Jack Le Brocq is the only driver less than 300 points — the value of a race victory — clear to 11th. His margin is a slender 62 points to Andre Heimgartner immediately behind him — and there are five drivers in total with a shot at overhauling him.
“It’s extremely important for those guys,” Payne, safely through and in the points lead, tells Fox Sports. “It’s a year breaker. But that’s not to say there are no championship stakes for the rest of the top 10 at Bathurst. Though the points of the top 10 drivers are reset for the following round on the Gold Coast, extra points are awarded based on title position.
The series leader gets a 130-point boost on the driver who finishes second, with the additional points decreasing in increments down to 21 points for 10th. With the bottom three drivers eliminated after the first round of the finals, those extra points could mean the difference between staying alive and elimination.
Payne could finish as low as third, while Broc Feeney, the Sprint Cup winner, could fall to as low as seventh — though his 25 bonus points for winning the Sprint Cup mean he would likely bottom out at fifth if he were to fail to finish at Bathurst. The winner of the Enduro Cup, with points tallied between Tailem Bend and Bathurst, will also receive what could be a critical 25 points for the Gold Coast.
Mostert leads that ranking, and they would be particularly valuable points for him given he sits just eighth on the table currently.
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