Kostecki and Hazelwood won the 2026 Repco Bathurst 1000 in the #17 Mustang, chassis DJRS-09-MR. Image: Shell V-Power Racing Team
The Ford Mustang that crossed the line first at Mount Panorama on Sunday, October 11, was never meant to be a Dick Johnson Racing car. Chassis DJRS-09-MR was built by Erebus Motorsport fabricator James White for Blanchard Racing Team, which never raced it and sold it on. DJR re-plated it, put Shell colours on it, and handed it to Brodie Kostecki for 2026. Eight months later it carried Kostecki and Todd Hazelwood to the fastest Bathurst 1000 ever run.
That is a strange career path for a car that is now the most valuable thing in DJR’s Stapylton workshop. It also says a lot about how Gen3 Supercars actually get built, and why the question of what happens to this particular Mustang next is more interesting than it sounds.
A hand-me-down with a perfect record at the Mountain
Kostecki has burned through chassis since arriving at DJR. He started 2025 in DJRS-07-MR, another Erebus-built car, until a heavy qualifying crash on the Saturday of the 2025 Gold Coast 500 put it out of action. He finished last season in DJRS-08-MR, the car Will Davison had raced first, and won with it at the Adelaide finale. That chassis has since gone to rookie Rylan Gray.
DJRS-09-MR was the fresh start. Kostecki gave it a 19-lap shakedown at Queensland Raceway on February 3, inside the 60km limit Supercars allows for a new chassis shakedown. His verdict at the time was mostly about the door: seeing the No. 17 on it, he said, was “pretty special.”
The engineering point worth making is that a Gen3 tub is not a brand-specific object in the way the old Holden-versus-Ford chassis wars were. The control chassis is common across the field, and the body and homologated parts make it a Mustang, a Camaro or a Supra. That is why a Camaro team’s fabrication shop can build a Ford for one team, see it sold unraced to another, and nobody blinks. It is also why “who built it” now matters less than “who sets it up,” and DJR’s engineering group can take full credit for what this car did at Bathurst.
There is a neat bit of symmetry in it, too. Kostecki and Hazelwood’s first Bathurst win together, in 2024, came for Erebus. Their second came in a car that started life on an Erebus jig, wearing a blue oval. Blanchard, meanwhile, has had a rough enough second half of the season without being reminded it once owned a Bathurst winner. Its double disqualification at The Bend is still prompting arguments about the 37 percent rule.
The stop that should have lost it
The car’s Bathurst Sunday was not a cruise. Kostecki and Hazelwood started second, beside a polesitting Camaro. Hazelwood opened the race and built a lead of more than 10 seconds despite a pinched nerve that left him losing feeling in his foot, which is not ideal in a car where the right pedal does most of the talking down Conrod Straight.
Then the lap 125 stop went wrong. A slow right-front brake change added roughly 30 seconds and dropped the No. 17 to fifth. Here is where the race was actually won. With the car fuelled to the brim at that stop, DJR could push the final stop out to lap 150, leaving Kostecki an 11-lap sprint to the flag on a full attack fuel load while the cars ahead of him were managing consumption over longer stints.
He used it. Kostecki rejoined fourth, 18 seconds down, and set Gen3 lap records on laps 152 and 153 while reeling in Will Brown, whom he passed at Murray’s Corner for third. The only Safety Car of the day arrived with six laps to go after Chaz Mostert crashed at Forrest’s Elbow, which compressed the field and gave Kostecki a shot at the front. He took second from Zach Bates at Murray’s with three laps left.
The leaders, Anton De Pasquale and Lee Holdsworth in the Team 18 Camaro, had been told “maximum fuel save” with six laps remaining. It was not enough. Their car ran dry on Mountain Straight on the final lap, and Kostecki went by. The winning margin over Brown and Scott Pye was 1.1844 seconds, with Bates and Aaron Seton third, just 1.927 seconds back.
The fuel story is the lesson. A race with no Safety Cars for 155 laps turned into what Tickford’s Rod Nash described as essentially a sprint race, and that punishes anyone whose fuel numbers assumed a caution would come along to bail them out. DJR’s brake-change disaster accidentally put Kostecki on the right side of that maths.
The numbers that make it a keeper
The No. 17 led 77 of 161 laps, more than any other car. The race took 5h54m04.7490s, a new record for the event, beating the mark Kostecki and Hazelwood set themselves in 2024. It is DJR’s fifth Bathurst 1000 win, after Dick Johnson and John French in 1981, Johnson and John Bowe in 1989 and 1994, and Scott McLaughlin and Alexandre Prémat in 2019. And, as in 1981, the No. 17 started second beside a Camaro on pole.
Johnson, 81, was on the podium with Jill Johnson and Dr Ryan Story, and was in no mood to treat it as a farewell. “I want a couple more before I fall off the perch,” he said.
The car has not had an easy life getting here, either. After contact with David Reynolds in Tasmania, Kostecki’s Mustang needed a new rear clip before Darwin, with the old one sent away for crack testing. “We suspect when we get that thing crack tested that we will find cracks,” Story said at the time. A car that has been re-plated, re-clipped and rebuilt is now the one with the Peter Brock Trophy attached to its history.
Trophy cabinet or tool kit?
Bathurst-winning Supercars are the closest thing the category has to blue-chip collectibles, and race cars from championship-winning or Great Race-winning seasons routinely change hands for serious money once their competitive life is over. For a team, though, the calculation is different. A winning chassis is a piece of identity, the physical proof of a result, and DJR’s own heritage is built on cars like Johnson’s 1981 Falcon.
The more pressing issue is that DJR cannot afford to get sentimental yet. Kostecki heads into the Finals fourth in the seeding order and third in points on 2271, behind Matt Payne (2490) and Broc Feeney (2285), with Brown fourth on 2146. Payne’s points lead came the hard way, after an electrical fault cost him the Sprint Cup, and Brown arrives with the Enduro Cup in hand. A title contender’s fastest car does not go on a plinth in October.
What to watch on the Gold Coast
The Finals open at the Gold Coast 500 on October 23–25, the same event where Kostecki destroyed DJRS-07-MR in qualifying a year ago, and where qualifying has been moved to Friday this season. Street circuits do not reward a car’s Bathurst form so much as its kerb behaviour and braking stability, so the real test for the No. 17 is whether DJR can turn a fast car into a consistent one over the remaining rounds.
If it can, DJRS-09-MR might yet earn a second line on its CV. If it cannot, the team still owns the best second-hand purchase in recent Supercars memory.
About the Author
