Photo by Caio Renato de Campos via Pexels (free to use)
Six laps vanished from the end of the AirTouch 500 at The Bend on Sunday, and two Ford Mustangs vanished from the results with them. Blanchard Racing Team lost James Golding and Richie Stanaway from seventh, and Aaron Cameron and Zak Best from 25th, because one driver in each car finished the race short of the minimum lap count every driver has to hit in a Supercars enduro. The double disqualification overshadowed a maiden enduro win for Toyota.
The reaction has been loud and broadly one note: change the rule so a shortened race cannot take a driver’s minimum away from them. It is a reasonable instinct. It is also, once you open the Operations Manual and run the numbers, a far harder thing to write than it is to demand.
The clause everyone assumes is missing already exists
Supercars’ sporting rules already carry the escape hatch. Rule D8.10.5.3 states that the 37 percent minimum “may be amended, at the sole discretion of the Stewards if it is not possible for 74% of the Scheduled Race Distance to be completed.”
So the discretion is there. It simply is not triggered by fault, by bad luck, or by how close a driver got. It is triggered by one number: whether three-quarters of the advertised race can physically be run.
The Bend 500 was scheduled for 147 laps. Seventy-four percent of that is 109. The race ran 141. The stewards were not being severe in declining to help Blanchard — they had nothing to decline with. The clause never opened.
That matters for the campaign now underway, because the ask is not really “give the stewards discretion.” They have it. The ask is to re-point the trigger at something else entirely.
A shortened race does not cost two drivers. It costs one.
Here is the part that keeps getting skipped, and it is the part that actually explains the disqualifications.
Rule D8.10.5.1 sets a per-driver floor of 37 percent of scheduled distance. Rule D8.10.5.2 then does teams the courtesy of printing the answer rather than making them compute it:
| Event | Scheduled race distance | Minimum required per driver |
|---|---|---|
| Tailem Bend 500 | 147 laps | 54 laps |
| Bathurst 1000 | 161 laps | 60 laps |
Two drivers at 54 laps each accounts for 108 of the scheduled 147. That leaves 39 laps of slack, which sounds comfortable and is not, because the slack is not shared. It sits wherever the stint plan leaves it.
A time-certain finish removes laps from the end of a race. Not the middle, not proportionally — the end. Whoever is driving when the flag falls absorbs the entire loss.
Blanchard’s plan had Stanaway do the heavy lifting early. Supercars’ race report credits him with a 90-lap ironman stint before he handed the No. 7 CoolDrive Mustang to Golding for the run home. Ninety of the 141 completed laps in Stanaway’s column leaves roughly 51 in Golding’s, against a requirement of 54.
The slack had already been spent, hours earlier, on purpose, by a strategy that was entirely legal and reasonably conventional — and that quietly moved all of the shortened-race risk onto the driver who was never going to get those laps back. The No. 3 car had the same structural exposure from a different direction: damage left it classified on 137 laps, squeezing the same arithmetic harder.
Run the popular fix and Blanchard still loses both cars
The most common suggestion is the tidiest one: stop measuring the minimum against scheduled distance and measure it against the distance actually completed.
Apply that at The Bend and the requirement becomes 37 percent of 141 laps — 52.17, call it 53. Golding, at around 51, is still short. Cameron is not remotely close.
The fix most people are asking for would not have changed a single line of Sunday’s result sheet. That is not an argument against it; recalculating against actual distance is defensible on its own terms. But anyone advancing it as the remedy for this particular weekend should know that it is not one.
The version that works costs something real
The fix that would have saved Blanchard is the one that credits a driver with laps they did not drive: take the six laps the race lost and add them back to the final driver’s tally. Golding lands on about 57, clears the bar, and the result stands.
That is also the fix that quietly guts the rule.
The minimum-driving requirement exists for one reason: to stop a team parking its star behind the wheel for a token stint while a quick professional co-driver does the real work. The moment a driver can satisfy a minimum with notional laps, the floor stops being a floor, and every shortened enduro becomes an argument about how many laps somebody theoretically would have completed.
There is a third path, and it is the one worth arguing for: declare the adjusted requirement the moment time certainty is called, and call it early enough to be useful.
That is where Sunday genuinely failed the teams. Ryan Wood pitted on lap 113 “as the possibility of a time certain finish became a question,” in the words of Supercars’ own report, and the finish was only confirmed with roughly 20 minutes remaining. Blanchard’s decisive stint call had been made long before either moment. The information that would have let them react arrived after the window to react had shut.
A rule change that only moves the threshold does nothing about that. A rule change that moves the timing of the announcement might.
The rule book was not the confusing part
It is worth being blunt about what did and did not go wrong here, because sympathy tends to blur it.
There was no percentage for anyone to misread. D8.10.5.2 prints a two-row table with the number sitting in it: 147 laps scheduled, 54 laps minimum. The requirement was fixed before the transporters left the last round.
What failed was a projection of how many laps the race would run, and that projection lived in a piece of software rather than a regulation. Any rewrite of D8.10 leaves that failure mode completely intact. Teams will still have to model a shortened finish and build a stint plan that survives one.
The points moved to people who never touched the car
Disqualifications in a championship this tight do not just subtract. They redistribute.
Golding and Stanaway crossed the line seventh and scored nothing. Everyone behind them moved up a rung in the points column: Anton De Pasquale and Lee Holdsworth banked 182 from eighth on the road, Andre Heimgartner and Bryce Fullwood 167, Rylan Gray and Tony D’Alberto 154, Jack Le Brocq and Harri Jones 142, Thomas Randle and Reuben Goodall 130.
Le Brocq is the name to watch. Supercars has confirmed the top eight in points are locked into the Finals, which leaves the remaining places to be settled at Bathurst — and Le Brocq collected a full position’s worth of extra points on Sunday without passing anybody. Golding, who was in the middle of the fight for those places, collected none.
Bathurst is where this gets expensive
Everything above scales up in three weeks, and not gently.
The Bathurst 1000 is scheduled for 161 laps with a 60-lap minimum per driver. Two drivers at 60 accounts for 120 laps — 74.5 percent of the race — leaving 41 laps of slack, proportionally no more generous than The Bend.
The difference is the dispensation clause. Seventy-four percent of 161 is a shade over 119 laps, and Mount Panorama is a far likelier place to finish below that line: red flags, a circuit with no run-off worth the name, and weather that can differ between the top and the bottom of the mountain. The clause that was dead on arrival at Tailem Bend could easily be live at Bathurst, where the entry list keeps growing.
A second constraint only bites over the longer race, too. Rule D8.10.2 caps any driver at three and a half hours of continuous driving, measured from pit exit to pit entry. Across 500 kilometres that is academic. Across a 1,000-kilometre race running six hours or more, an ironman stint of the kind Stanaway produced on Sunday starts pressing against a second ceiling while it is busy creating the first problem.
Watch the co-driver stint plans through practice at Bathurst. Teams that bank their co-driver’s laps early and leave the primary driver a thin margin for the run home are the ones exposed if the race comes up short, and a weekend that began with the West circuit returning to The Bend and ended with two cars struck from the results is a fair warning about how fast a plan stops being a plan. Blanchard paid for that lesson twice in one afternoon.
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