Photo: Kytabu, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Brodie Kostecki won this year’s Bathurst 1000 and went into the Finals fourth in the points. On Friday evening at Surfers Paradise he was 11th on the grid for the Gold Coast 500 opener, 0.0388 seconds short of the tenth and last Top Ten Shootout place. Two kerb strikes at the Beach Chicane on his final flying laps and a mistake at the last corner did it. That is the margin between a shot at Saturday’s Shootout and a shrug.
What the timing sheet says
Anton De Pasquale’s #18 Camaro took provisional pole at 1:09.077 in the session that sets the grid for Race 31. Broc Feeney was 0.0690s back, Matt Payne 0.0744s and Andre Heimgartner 0.0871s, so four cars sat inside nine hundredths. The whole top ten was covered by 0.2994s. Kostecki’s miss works out to about an eighth of the gap between pole and tenth, which is a very small thing to lose a Shootout on. With qualifying now run on Friday afternoon (we covered the schedule change in September), a sloppy final run leaves no day in hand to recover.
Payne, who arrived leading the Finals standings, did it the hard way. He threw a drive belt in Practice 2, never got his qualifying simulation in, and still ended up third.
Three drivers go home from this weekend
This is the first of three Finals rounds. Ten drivers began the weekend in title contention, three are eliminated after the two Gold Coast races, and the other seven carry on to Sandown. Eight of the ten Shootout cars belong to Finals drivers: De Pasquale, Feeney, Payne, Mostert, Wood, Brown, Allen and Waters. Kostecki and Jack Le Brocq are the only two Finals drivers who missed it, and Le Brocq qualified 17th.
The other two Shootout places belong to Heimgartner (fourth) and Thomas Randle (eighth), neither of whom is in the Finals ten. Starting that high with no title to protect makes them useful traffic for a lot of drivers who have everything to lose. That is analysis rather than a prediction, but expect the first few corners of Race 31 to be crowded with cars driven by people with different incentives.
The margins in the standings after Bathurst were thin: Payne 3150, Feeney 3145, Will Brown 3103, Kostecki 3096. Le Brocq was tenth on 3021, 129 points off the lead and starting from the back half of the grid.
Brown’s penalty cuts both ways
Brown qualified seventh, then picked up a two-place grid penalty. Motorsport Australia stewards found that he slowed on the racing line approaching the final corner on a preparation lap while Le Brocq was on a push lap and had to move offline. They judged it unintentional but careless. The penalty applies from wherever Brown finishes in Saturday’s Shootout, so his final grid slot is not yet known. Brown told the stewards he had not been warned that Car 4 was coming.
The awkward part is who got in the way. Le Brocq is a Finals driver sitting on the bottom rung of the standings, and Brown is third in points. A two-place penalty is the standard price for this offence, but it will not give Le Brocq back the time he lost.
Triple Eight’s engine week
Brown’s weekend began with a crank angle sensor problem in Practice 1, where he was ninth. Triple Eight changed the engine in his #888 Ford before Practice 2. It is the team’s second engine change in two events, after Feeney’s before Bathurst. Both cars ended up in the top seven on the grid, which says the swaps cost them no speed. A sensor fault on a car third in the standings deserves watching all the same, because the Finals format does not leave room for a mid-weekend repair to become a retirement.
Chaz Mostert, the defending champion, qualified fifth in a replacement Toyota Supra after his Bathurst crash, which follows a rookie Supra season that has already produced wins. Ryan Wood was sixth and Kai Allen ninth, while Cam Waters scraped into tenth by 0.0388s over Kostecki. Kostecki’s #17 is the Mustang with the unusual chassis history behind this year’s Bathurst win, and it now has to climb from 11th to protect his Finals position.
What to watch next
The Top Ten Shootout runs Saturday at 1:35pm AEDT, followed by Race 31 at 4:15pm AEDT. Race 32 is Sunday at 3:45pm AEDT. Rain is forecast, which could rearrange a grid that took 30 minutes of qualifying to decide. Watch Kostecki’s progress from 11th, where Brown ends up after his penalty, and whether Heimgartner and Randle play it clean next to Finals rivals.
Lead image: Photo: Kytabu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Timing data: Supercars official results.
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