[ad_1]
Visits to Bathurst rarely disappoint, and the 2024 Supercars opener at Mount Panorama was no exception.
Triple Eight teammates Will Brown and Broc Feeney have immediately established themselves as title protagonists one weekend into their first season as teammates to set up the mouth-watering intrateam duel so many had hoped for.
But some older heads have also risen up the order to disrupt the title permutations, leaving the sport and the fight for the championship feeling wide open.
Watch every race of the 2024 Repco Supercars Championship LIVE & ad-break free during racing. New to Kayo? Start Your Free Trial Today >
Not everyone left the weekend in good spirits, however, with the defending title-winning team and a championship favourite licking their wounds.
WINNER: WILL BROWN
Will Brown walked away from his first weekend with Triple Eight as a race and round winner and with the championship lead.
Team switches don’t go more smoothly or come more sweetly than that.
Brown was on the pace all weekend in a tight battle with incumbent teammate Broc Feeney. There was little to split them, and the record book will reflect each took a pole and a victory to leave them split by nine points after the Bathurst 500.
But Brown could so easily have been a dual winner had it not been for a bit of finger trouble and a strategic twist on Saturday.
He was entitled to be serviced first as the leader at the first stops, but he was slow to release his pit limiter exiting the lane, costing him a few seconds.
Unclear at the time too was that the overcut was competitive. Feeney made the most of his chance to jump his new teammate for the lead when he stopped on the following tour.
On similar strategies and in equal cars, there was little Brown could do to reverse the order from there.
There were no such mistakes in the second race, though, when the Banyo newcomer aced his strategy to overhaul Chaz Mostert for victory.
It all amounted to a warning shot to the entire field — and to teammate Feeney — that Brown needs no time to settle in and adjust to his new environment.
He’s ready for a title fight, and at the sport’s most famous circuit, he was the first to stake his claim.
Feeney claims chaotic Supercars opener | 01:22
LOSER: EREBUS
Triple Eight’s Brown gain is Erebus’s loss, with the title-defending team stumbling in its first round back.
Erebus is fielding an all-new driver line-up after on off-season from hell thanks to Brodie Kostecki’s shock defection.
Team owner Betty Klimenko and CEO Barry Ryan made an emotional first public acknowledgment of the situation though shed little additional light on the cause of the breakdown in relationship with their star driver.
On track the team looked little like the squad of yesteryear.
Kostecki dominated qualifying for last year’s Bathurst 1000, smoking the field by almost half a second.
This year Todd Hazelwood and Jack Le Brocq qualified seventh and 11th and then 12th and sixth respectively. The fastest Erebus car was around half a second off pole each day.
Of course the drivers need time to settle into the team. The cars are different this year, as are the tyre compounds. This weekend wasn’t a perfect like-for-like comparison with last October.
But with Triple Eight taking a good step forward and several other teams appearing to close the gap to the front, Erebus looks like it’s stood still — and standing still leaves teams sinking down the order.
It sets up the Australian Grand Prix is a big test. Last year the team won two races and had at least one driver on the podium for the other two. In shorter races with no real scope for strategy, it’ll be closer to a pure performance test.
Already the pressure is ramping up on the reigning champion team.
‘It hurts’ Erebus owners raw interview | 08:02
WINNER: CHAZ MOSTERT
Chaz Mostert looked over the moon to have narrowly missed two victory chances over the weekend.
That speaks volumes about the depths from which Walkinshaw Andretti United has recovered from last season.
WAU was all over the shop in the first Gen3 year, delivering Mostert a rare winless season after back-to-back third-place finishes in the drivers championship.
But the reworked car rolled out of its Bathurst garage and looked immediately competitive, and the 31-year-old wasted no time wielding it to his advantage.
Third and second in qualifying translated to the same in both races, though he had the pace to potentially do better.
He was closing in on the lead Triple Eight cars on Saturday afternoon when a late safety car intervention ended the race early, depriving him of a last-gasp shot of improving.
He took the lead off the line on Sunday, but a slow tyre change left him at Brown’s mercy, and snookered a strategic shot at recovery.
But it’s a seriously buoying result all the same. The pace is there. The smile is back.
And at this early stage it looks like a championship battle is on.
Carnage unfolds in wild curtain-raiser | 00:49
LOSER: CAM WATERS
Cam Waters has been tipped to be a title contender this year. Having picked up some opportunistic late wins last season, it seemed like Tickford has the smallest step to make to join the leaders.
He finished 22nd and 16th at the end of a forgettable weekend.
Bad luck played a role. A last-gasp qualifying lap on Saturday was scuppered by yellow flags, leaving him on the third-last row. A chaotic start then left him with damage, and a loose wheel eventually put him out of his misery.
But whereas Thomas Randle recovered from a similarly anonymous start to qualify seventh and finish fourth on Sunday, Waters barely improved.
The team said the two-time championship runner-up struggled with rear grip through the weekend, but the Sunday pasting by Randle was a clear blow in the newly downsized two-car team.
It left 2007 champion and Fox Sports pundit Garth Tander unimpressed.
“I love Cam, I love the way he goes about driving the race car, but for me he’s been kicking his bottom lip out of the way for a little bit now,” he told Fox Sports.
“The attitude and the mindset need to change a little bit, and I think that’s why Thomas Randle got on top of him this weekend.
“Cam is probably letting some peripheral factors influence the way he’s going about race weekends.
“If he can get past that and just get back to driving the race car and maximising his own performance, then they’ll be back in the game.”
It’s only one of 12 rounds, but Waters can’t afford many off weekends in a field as tight as this if he wants to maximise his chances of a title shot.
“Writing my story” – Hamilton Merc move | 00:57
WINNERS: DRIVERS SWITCHING TEAMS
Will Brown has obviously made his Triple Eight switch an early success, but he wasn’t the only one to walk away smiling from his first weekend with a new team.
Richie Stanaway’s Grove debut was sensational. Not only did he crack the shootout on Saturday, but fourth at the flag was his career best result as a solo driver, easily bettering his previous best of ninth at Winton in 2018 and Pukekohe the following season.
A follow-up 11th on Sunday had him leave Bathurst fourth in the championship standings.
The man he replaced, Dave Reynolds, is tied with him on 192 points after making his own successful change to Team 18. He overcame a puncture in the Saturday shootout and a misfiring engine in qualifying on Sunday to earn two top-10 finishes in the races to comfortably lead incumbent teammate Mark Winterbottom. His capacity for career reinvention continues to impress.
Nick Percat has found a new lease on life at Matt Stone Racing. A perennial backmarker during his two seasons at WAU, he twice made the top-10 shootout at the weekend to finish sixth and ninth at the flag, putting him sixth on the title table. Having considered his career to be at a crossroads only a few months ago, this will have been a massive boost in confidence for the South Australian in his quest to return to the top step of the podium.
Ricciardo’s CLOSE CALL | 01:01
WINNER: SUPERCARS
Supercars started its 2024 campaign following a tumultuous off-season.
It lost star driver Shane van Gisbergen to the United States and Brodie Kostecki to a messy dispute with his team.
Arguments over parity overshadowed much of last season, but despite a big-money trip to the US for wind tunnel testing to minimise the difference between aero performance, last week debate started again, this time about equality of engine power.
In that light, the sport surely couldn’t have been happier with how the first round went.
Yes, Triple Eight took both poles and won both races. That obviously won’t be to everyone’s tastes.
But the championship looks more open that it did last year. WAU appears to have filled the breach left by Erebus as T8’s closest challenger, with Mostert a match for both Feeney and Brown.
Rookie Ryan Wood was also competitive for WAU and can be expected to be a more frequent interlope as he builds experience.
Grove, Team 18 and MSR all look competitive immediately behind this leading duo. In Randle’s hands Tickford ended the weekend looking punchy too.
At shorter and less demanding tracks more representative of the broader calendar all four teams will have a better opportunity to muscle into the leading back.
And given that group is a mix of Chevrolet and Ford teams and Bathurst is the sport’s most demanding circuit, Supercars leaves its first race feeling confident that parity is close to being finally achieved. There’s an acknowledgment of more work to do on the engine front, but the different appeared minimal around Mount Panorama.
One round doesn’t answer every question, but it was an optimistic start to the new season.
[ad_2]
Source link