Mount Panorama is the home of the unpredictable narrative.
Perhaps the only certainties during each edition of Bathurst 1000 are tension, drama and heartbreak. The first of those came during an epic sprint finish as the race went into its sixth hour. The other two were delivered within seconds.
Rarely had experts prepared for a great race so unsure of what was to come. Eighteen of the 28 cars were in the sand trap or collided with the fence during practice, there were co-drivers with poor running times, there was no read on the racetrack.
“We’ve got no form guide,” Mark Larkham offered from pit lane.
They were about to find out a form guide would have counted for little – at least for those beyond eventual champions Shane van Gisbergen and Garth Tander.
It took less than 10 seconds for drama to strike, but it took far longer for anyone watching to work out what had transpired when a safety car was deployed on the opening lap.
Carnage struck the Bathurst 1000 early.Credit:Getty
You could hardly pin it on one culprit. Zak Best and Thomas Randle’s car crashed out of the race, Jamie Whincup had trouble gaining traction, Mark Winterbottom was bashed up, while Jack Perkins spun out and conceded “who knows whose fault it was”.
The chaos was only just beginning. While the rain hadn’t even started to fall, the tears soon would.
Rival teams were left fuming when Zane Goddard went off the track, surged back from the grass and slammed into two cars in a moment of madness.
Matt Campbell’s car was battered into horrendous shape, his day finished in the blink of an eye. An emotional Dale Wood crashed out. Winterbottom’s wheels were still in working condition but the car was soon held together by tape.
Wood’s partner Andre Heimgartner did not miss in his scathing assessment.
“It is like these people don’t realise it is 161 laps and they are driving like absolute losers,” Heimgartner said. “Hopefully they get their shit together and we don’t have more safety cars and ruin more cars.”
Winterbottom was in disbelief at the number of cars written off so early, musing “we might win, we might be the only one left on the track at the end”, while 50-year-old Greg Murphy tried to find a method in “complete madness”, wondering “are they trying to win it in the first stint?”
The carnage was such that three quarters of the field had been involved in some sort of incident at the halfway point of the 161-lap epic. By the time we reached the 103rd lap, only three had evaded the chaos.
Thirteen safety cars during the 2000 race marked the most Bathurst 1000 had ever seen. Six inside 57 laps of this year’s edition meant that number looked under threat.
When normality resumed, there was one clear favourite after van Gisbergen and Tander moved to the front during the fifth safety car period. Nobody would rein them in.
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