The Supercars series is enjoying the sort of moment rarely sighted in any motorsport championship anywhere in the world.
With every passing round, the already close title battle is getting only tighter.
Arriving in Sydney, the top four of the championship was led by Will Brown ahead of Brodie Kostecki, Broc Feeney and Shane van Gisbergen. The quartet was spread across 72 points.
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They left Sydney separated by just 67 points, with Kostecki leading Brown, Van Gisbergen and Feeney.
We’re now well into the second half of the campaign, well past the establishing phase of the championship battle. The endurance season is in sight, with only the Bend still to come before the crucial Sandown and Bathurst races.
It’s feels less like we’re waiting for a driver to stamp their authority on the series and more like we’re watching a game of musical chairs. Who’ll have a seat at the top of the standings when the music stops?
HIT: KOSTECKI’S TITLE LEAD
The orange numbers returned to Kostecki’s windshield on Saturday night after the Erebus driver picked up his first victory since the Australian Grand in April.
It was a much-needed result for the return championship leader, banishing the bad memories from Townsville, where car problems dumped him to a lowly 19th.
But the almost four-month break between drinks of champagne from the top step underlines a quiet strength of Kostecki’s campaign: consistency.
He has only three wins to his name for the season, fewer than Brown, Feeney and Van Gisbergen.
But his tally of 12 podiums is comfortably larger than those of his pursuers. Brown and Feeney have only nine apiece, while Van Gisbergen has just eight.
His title lead is built on consistency, in particular his seven-race run of podiums spanning Melbourne to Perth, a streak yet to be matched by another driver this year.
He was the second-heaviest scorer this weekend, collecting just 11 points fewer than SVG.
That’s impressive not just in its own right but also in the context of these new regulations, which have made it difficult for teams and drivers to build momentum as they learn their way around the Gen3 cars.
Kostecki can’t lose points every weekend of course, but if these are his worst weekends, he can feel optimistic that he’ll be in the mix come the end of the campaign.
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MISS: PERCEPTIONS OF PENALTY CONSISTENCY
It wouldn’t be hard racing if there wasn’t some controversy about the battles — and, inevitably, the way those battles are umpired.
Saturday featured one of the year’s bigger blow-ups when Van Gisbergen copped a five-second penalty for a bump and run in combat with Will Brown for a spot on the podium.
If you’ve watched Supercars, you’ve seen this sort of thing before.
In this instance SVG was harrying Brown for position, making bumper-to-bumper contact into corners to try to force the error.
Eventually the error came, Brown bobbled wide and Van Gisbergen was through — temporarily at least, before the penalty dropped him to seventh.
Erebus boss Barry Ryan was apoplectic about the move.
“He can’t keep f***ing doing that, it’s bullshit,” he told Fox Sports after the race. “He hit him up the arse and he passed him. You can’t do that.
“We’re just going to make sure he gets done this time and not let off, because we’re sick of it.”
Ryan was later fined for his expletive-ladened live rant.
Brown was unsurprisingly on the same page. “There was no exchange, I just got punted,” he declared.
But not everyone was convinced.
Obviously Van Gisbergen, who hasn’t been afraid of making clear when he’s been put off-side, was most displeased.
“Unfortunately we faced issues out of our control,” he said. “These things you come to expect in 2023.”
But several drivers, including Andre Heimgartner on Sunday night, pointed out that the entire field features plenty of bumping on an average weekend but that much of it escapes the attention of television cameras given it’s generally for lower order places.
“Quite often Chaz [Mostert] moves people out the way as well,” Heimgartner said, naming one example. “A lot of drivers do it. It is not just one person.
“Sometimes you screw people over and sometimes you get screwed over. It’s just the way it is.”
One could also point out that Van Gisbergen was given the all-clear for a similar move on Kostecki in Perth. Kostecki at the time described it as fair racing.
The rules of engagement and driver standards are meant to evolve naturally over time. Different results don’t have to be borne of problematic inconsistency.
But certainly there’ll have been people scratching their heads on Saturday night.
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TENTATIVE HIT: FURTHER PARITY MEASURES
The entire season and the last two rounds in particular have been dominated by arguments over parity between the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro in the first year of the Gen3 regulations.
Last time out, in the days before Townsville, the Mustang was granted tweaks to its rear wing to address downforce and balance issues, particularly as they related to traction and tyre wear.
Ahead of this weekend the series made changes to the throttle body. The Ford engine now uses a smaller throttle body, in line with the same used in the Camaro, in the hope driveability complaints might be addressed and better tyre life observed.
Sydney Motorsport Park is where the arguments started, having been the site of the all-in pre-season test. It’s a good all-round test of a car’s capabilities, and so the weekend’s Sydney SuperNight was seen as a crucial experiment in the quest for parity.
The result? Okay. Ish.
“The throttle body change is definitely more of a notice on the cracked throttle pick-up,” Chaz Mostert said. “I’d say the lag was slightly, a little bit, there, so I’d say the driveability is a bit nicer.”
But problems remain.
“We seem to be trucking along pretty good, but then later in the stints it’s really hard to drive,” Mostert continued. “When we come to these higher degradation places we’re struggling a little bit more.
“The high-speed balance I feel with my car, for whatever reason, was being a struggle, even in qualifying.”
Given Mostert’s strong language around parity earlier this month, we can call that precious progress.
MISS: DRIVER MORALE
This was quite the weekend for driver sass, with Cameron Waters winning the round for memorable outburst.
The Tickford racer had been pinged for an unsafe release from pit lane on Saturday — he’d been judged to have forced Broc Feeney to hit the brakes to avoid an accident — and was told of his impending five-second punishment over team radio.
“What the f*** is wrong with this sport,” he exclaimed over radio. “They wonder why all their drivers want to f***ing leave them.”
The comments appeared to have been in reference to Van Gisbergen’s apparently imminent switch from Supercars to NASCAR following news he’s set for a second cameo appearance next month.
Kostecki, who has a strong affinity for racing in the US, was also recently confirmed for a one-off NASCAR appearance in a couple of weeks, while there’s no shortage of rumours about Cam Waters’s future. We’re also in a time when cross-discipline racing feels as though it could be on the cusp of having a moment.
SVG, who was incensed by his own penalty on Saturday night, pointedly told the Fox Sports broadcast that he agreed with Waters’s sentiments when asked about the way his racing had been policed.
Mostert leapt to Waters’s defence afterwards, describing radio outbursts as unfair game given their made in the heat of competition.
The WAU driver is right of course, and drivers aren’t thinking about whether they’re being publicly broadcast when they’re communicating with the pit wall.
But sometimes those sorts of communications offer the most transparent glimpse to a driver’s mindset and the paddock mood.
