Supercars drivers have shared their heartbreak at the cancellation of the Bathurst 1000 Top 10 Shootout – but agreed organisers made the “right decision.”
Cameron Waters will start on pole after topping Friday’s qualifying session, but said he was gutted by the cancellation of the one-lap showdown to decide the front of the grid.
“I feel like I’ve done half the job. Yesterday was great, being quickest in the wet, that’s obviously cool,” he said. “I respect the decision that they’ve made.”
“The Shootout for me is probably one of the highlights for me. I love getting into it and then putting it all on the line for a lap. I find that pretty exciting and I love it. But you know, the water that was on the track was crazy.”
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Asked how he felt about sitting on pole without a Shootout, he joked: “I’m sure I’ll feel okay when I start from P1 tomorrow morning. Right now it feels a little bit weird because I didn’t have to earn it like we usually would. But I still did the (pole) lap yesterday. It doesn’t really bother me. I’m just thinking about tomorrow’s race, that’s the one we want to win.”
For retiring superstar Lee Holdsworth, a former winner of the Great Race, the Shootout had been one of the moments he was most looking forward to this weekend.
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Holdsworth, who will start second, said: “It’s a little bit of an empty feeling for me. I really wanted to have a crack at my last Top 10 Shootout and didn’t get to do it. But as Cam said, they made the right call. The track was ridiculously bad with the water, the rivers.
“It was looking like it was probably possible to run it at the start but then, as Shane (Howard, Supercars CEO) said, that next front started rolling in and it was back to being undrivable.
“Our cars would probably be aquaplaning in third gear and we probably wouldn’t have reached full throttle for the whole lap. So it wouldn’t have been that entertaining for people to watch anyway. But year, still a little bit empty but very happy to be starting off the front.”
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Defending Bathurst champion Chaz Mostert, who will start third, said: “I was ready to go.
“The water on the track was probably worrying, but the biggest thing in for a Top 10 Shootout is you’ve just got no tyre, car temp. These cars are quite sketchy in those conditions.
“If it was just another qualifying, a 20-minute qualifying or something like that and all 10 cars are on track together, we’d have to the time to build up to it and find where those safety things are. But I thought Supercars did the right decision. Because for us 10 drivers to go out there on a warm up lap with a cold car and ask us to go and try and do something special in those conditions, to try and beat each other – I think we would have found probably half the 10 to be in trouble, and another five probably would have been a bit more sensible. I probably would be one of the five that wasn’t,” he joked.
“I’m happy with the call.”
Holdsworth added: “There would have been cars, 100 per cent, in the fence, so it was the right call … it would have been literally undrivable at that speed.”
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