Supercars JUB JUB Supercars thread

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11 of the last 18 Bathursts have been close too for very much the same reasons

No one can pass
No... they were close because they had SCs which bunched the field close to the end.

Last year there was no SC in the last 500km of the race, which is why it wasn't close. This year there was an SC with 30 laps to go, which bunched them up, resulting in a close finish between Feeney & Kostecki.

We saw passes in all the usual spots this year - at Hell Corner, the top of Mountain Straight, and in The Chase.
 
No... they were close because they had SCs which bunched the field close to the end.

Last year there was no SC in the last 500km of the race, which is why it wasn't close. This year there was an SC with 30 laps to go, which bunched them up, resulting in a close finish between Feeney & Kostecki.

We saw passes in all the usual spots this year - at Hell Corner, the top of Mountain Straight, and in The Chase.
This is where the finals series next year might spice things up.

People might NEED to take more risks to get in, or those who are safe not take them because they can.

Passing is still incredibly difficult
 
This is where the finals series next year might spice things up.

People might NEED to take more risks to get in, or those who are safe not take them because they can.

Passing is still incredibly difficult
That's not a bad point, particularly with Bathurst being the last event before the Finals.

For drivers in the mid-pack, it's likely to introduce a degree of desperation, as they compete for the points required to claim those last few positions in the top-10. The Waters/Mostert battle devolved today, once they decided just to settle for the points, rather than risk losing everything in an overtake-gone-wrong. If they're 10th & 11th going into Bathurst, then they're fighting all the way to the line, knowing that the winner makes the Finals and the loser misses out.

For those at the head of the pack, their positions in the Finals are likely to be secured already. They are thus free to fight for line honours, knowing that they have nothing to lose.

Having said that, by the time they get to the "final sprint to the line", they've already had 800-900km of racing, in which a pecking order has well and truly had time to get established. We probably still won't see much overtaking, as the faster cars will have already gravitated to the front, and the slower cars to the back, over the preceding 130-odd laps.

As for passing being "incredibly difficult", it's difficult at every track. At the end of the day, it's easier at Bathurst than almost any other race track in Australia.
 
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Hell of a race by Kostecki/Hazelwood and Feeney/Whincup. It was pretty close all day between those two cars. Cooper Murray drove really well as well. Incredible reliability of man and machine all day.
 

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A couple of last things...
  • All this talk comparing Bathurst to Monaco, for difficulty of overtaking, is complete and utter nonsense. Bathurst has 4 clear overtaking zones - Hell Corner, the top of Mountain Straight, Forrest Elbow, and the left hand corner in The Chase. That's 2-3 more overtaking zones than almost any other race track in Australia, and 4 more than Monaco. It's one of the easiest tracks for overtaking anywhere in the world, not one of the hardest.
  • Vaughan was interviewed during the race, about his crash with Mostert. He claimed that he wasn't expecting them to be so eager to get past. Now either he's incredibly inexperienced, incredibly stupid, or both. He was a slow car/driver, who was about to be lapped by drivers hunting a position in the top-5, and he'd been holding them up all the way from The Cutting to Forrest Elbow (all the way over the Mountain). Surely it would have been obvious to anyone & everyone that they were going to want to get past him at the first available opportunity (i.e. Forrest Elbow)? His interview highlighted just how culpable he was in causing the incident, and how little responsibility fell on the shoulders of Mostert.
 

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