Saturday morning at Mount Panorama arrived with sunshine and a promising splash of warmth. It ended with the first cancellation of the Top 10 Shootout in its 44 years, dating back to Peter Brock claiming pole back in 1978.
Earlier in the week, a Supercars organiser told me: “It happens every year. We get a forecast for tons of rain then we just get three dry days.”
The forecast was ominous indeed. Rain on Thursday and Friday, then much, much more on Saturday.
But the weather played fair on the first couple of days, even if the rain did fall.
Thursday’s two practice sessions were run in the dry, but slippery conditions meant crashes came thick and fast – four red flags in the two sessions, with a number of superstar, including reigning Supercars champion and current series leader Shane van Gisbergen.
Brodie Kostecki summed it up nicely when he said he had to “change his dacks” after a couple of scary incidents in the morning.
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The rain struck almost as soon as Thursday afternoon’s session concluded. By Thursday night, organisers opted to close the VIP parking to non four-wheel drives. Some braved the muddy carparks on Friday – a mistake they would come to regret. One fan I spoke to said he was bogged four times exiting the general carpark on Friday night (and he wasn’t alone there). He walked to the track on Saturday – and even the general carpark was closed.
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The on-track action on Friday was wetter, and wilder, than the day before. Friday morning remained dry, before the rain struck in a major way before the afternoon practice.
There were three red flags and a whopping 11 incidents in the hour-long session, as water pooled in giant puddles or slewed across the track. Drivers couldn’t even pull into pit lane safely, as a stream of water sent car after car sliding out through Murray’s Corner.
“Conditions are diabolical out there at the moment on Mount Panorama,” Bathurst great Mark Skaife said on Fox Sports.
Then came qualifying – and right on cue, the rain lessened.
And while there were fewer crashes, there was a monster one. Van Gisbergen, pushing desperately on his final flying lap, slammed into Macauley Jones at the Esses and sent him spinning into the wall.
Jones’ BJR team worked until nearly 2am that night to repair the damage. Van Gisbergen copped a three-place grid penalty.
Bathurst 1000: Top 10 Shootout cancelled | 01:43
And so we arrived at Saturday – the day the Bureau of Meteorology had promised would deliver rain in spades, with the risk of a major storm and warnings of flash flooding in the local area.
The two practice sessions on Saturday delivered a combined four red flags and a number of monster shunts, including the legendary Jamie Whincup slamming into a wall at Griffins Bend.
Concerns were mounting over the conditions. The rain fell steadily through the morning, but lessened during the middle of the day. Drivers, fans, and organisers alike had their fingers and toes crossed that it would hold off during the afternoon.
Those hopes were soon dashed. The long-awaited storm struck like a wall of water, sending shivers down the spines of the teams – and rivers of water straight across the track.
“I’ve never seen so much rain fall out of the sky,” four-time Bathurst winner Garth Tander said.
James Golding, who qualified 13th on Friday, told foxsports.com.au: “If there was ever a time I reckon you need floaties in your life, it’s now.”
Behind the scenes, organisers were worried. The rain wasn’t stopping – if anything, it was getting worse.
But the day continued. Fans lined up in the thousands behind the pit lane garages for a driver autograph session – a veritable sea of umbrellas. It was better there than some campsites, where a four-metre-wide river had opened up between rows of tents.
The drivers themselves were shivering in the sideways rain, all doing their best to stay dry.
On track, the conditions were worse than ever. The Toyota 86 series bravely attempted to get out there – only to deliver the biggest crash of the weekend down the Chase, as a teen gun slammed into his teammate stuck in the sand and ended up on his side.
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The organisers weren’t panicking – but they were certainly deeply, deeply worried. A Porsche Carrera race, and then a Dunlop Super2 race, were both cancelled.
Supercars were hoping the rain would stop. It didn’t. Even if it did, it probably wouldn’t have solved the biggest problem – the soaked paddocks beside the track were pouring water down onto the course. The driveways to the farms and houses around the Mountain were only channelling the rain straight onto the track.
Time was running out, but the ten chosen drivers were still preparing to take the track – even if they were doubting the session would go ahead. Chaz Mostert, reigning Bathurst champion, said afterwards that he only put on his race suit mere minutes before the session was meant to begin.
Half an hour before the session was set to begin, officials from Supercars, Motorsport Australia, the local council (who own and regulate the circuit), as well as the competition’s driver liaison, took to the track in a SUV. It inched around the flooded track – surprisingly driving in front of the Safety Car.
That odd sight was so the decision-makers could see just how bad conditions were, without the Safety Car dispersing any water. They stopped on track after the first corner, got out, stood in the muddy water and even tried to carve a channel to divert the water away from the track.
They got back in and continued their slow slog around the track. Back in pit-lane, someone floated a folded paper boat down a stream. Teams and drivers were becoming resigned to the truth – it was “undrivable” out there, as Lee Holdsworth said later.
“Yesterday, it was pretty wild in the wet, there were rivers across The Chase and Turn 1,” pole-sitter Cameron Waters said. “Yesterday we were lucky, because once you got past the rivers, the track was actually pretty good.
“Today, everything’s just drenched.”
One team official told me: “We can’t even see the mountain (from pit lane). There’s no chance.”
Rain causes CHAOS at Mount Panorama | 01:07
Officials debated postponing the Shootout to later in the evening. “We tried to give it as much time as we could to see if it would dissipate,” Supercars CEO Shane Howard said.
Throughout the day – the whole week – workers had been sent out to try and build or reinforce culverts beside the track to divert the torrents of water.
Race Director Mark Taylor said: “Best efforts were made to get it going. We were proactively trying to reschedule it, but mother nature has beat us on this one … We thought we were going to achieve it until the second (storm) front came through.”
That view was mirrored up and down the paddock. The drivers had been confident in the morning, despite the rain. But it was the early-afternoon torrential downpour that ruined their chances.
Lee Holdsworth, starting second, said: “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 said, that next front started rolling in and it was back to being undrivable.”
Officials even considered the unprecedented move of shifting it to Sunday morning. But that would give competing teams no time to change their set-up from one-lap qualifying pace to a race configuration, or do the hours of extensive cleaning and preparation for race day.
Howard replied: “Obviously we look at all the options open to us, but it’s very difficult to be able to redirect that Top 10 Shootout and the time taken to do that – it’s a time issue for tomorrow.
“The cars run a different set-up in a Shootout and the race … we don’t have the ability to manage that in the time tomorrow.”
As Mark Skaife said on Fox Sports: “From (positions) 11 to 28, there would have already been a lot more race preparation being done. There’s basically a program of whatever the component changes and making sure you’ve got the cars that have been running around in the rain (ready).
“They arrived here absolutely concourse condition, they could have been in a motor show … by the time they get to this race, by the time they’ve done seven sessions and having run in the rain, everything’s dirty, grimy, average.
“The thing that’s really bad about running in the rain is effectively all the electrical connectors. You have to pull everything out of the car, tidy it up, put it all back. It’s very labour intensive … a lot of those teams will be breathing a big sigh of relief.”
Teams were understandably anxious at the prospect of a crash that could ruin their entire weekend.
And the drivers were certain that crashes would happen. Holdsworth said: “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.”
Chaz Mostert said: “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.
As they waited for the decision to come, a team member told me – completely seriously – that the Shootout would deliver the slowest qualifying times in half a century. Lap times in Friday afternoon’s wet practice session for most cars were on par with 1995 – around 2 minutes 34 seconds. And Saturday’s conditions were far, far worse than Friday.
Waters said: “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.”
In the end, the drivers, teams, and organisers were in agreement – it was the right decision. Racing was truly untenable in those conditions.
Like the sunshine on Saturday morning, Sunday began with the promise of great things to come: at 7.30am, a rainbow briefly burst through the fog wreathed around Mount Panorama. In five minutes it disappeared under dark clouds. Cross your fingers.
