Source :- THE AGE NEWS
When Brodie Kostecki failed to secure pole position for the Bathurst 1000 on Saturday, he brushed off the disappointment.
“It would have been cool,” he said about almost becoming the first driver in the Great Race’s 61-year history to claim four successive poles.
Instead, Kostecki said: “I’d rather have my name on the [Peter Brock] trophy.”
That privilege is now his for the second time as he and co-driver Todd Hazelwood claimed their second Bathurst 1000 win on Sunday. And they did so in a fashion that will be remembered for years to come after Anton De Pasquale’s Team 18 car ran out of fuel on the last lap while leading.
With 40 of the 161 laps remaining, a win for Dick Johnson Racing looked likely as Kostecki and Hazelwood stormed to a commanding lead.
At that point, the race was most memorable for what it lacked – a safety car. It was the longest a race had gone without one since the safety car was introduced – except for 1989 and 1991 when there wasn’t one.
The first half of the race was relatively uneventful, and it seemed only a safety car, the race’s great equaliser, or something equally catastrophic could deny Kostecki the win.
Then, on lap 125, a disastrous pit stop turned the race on its head. A problem with a front right brake change took Kostecki not just out of the lead, but off the podium entirely. And taking his place was the same rookie, Bates, who had denied him that pole record a day earlier.
With most of the attention on Friday and Saturday focused on Bates and Kostecki, the driver who started from third on the grid, De Pasquale, had gone under the radar.
But he and Team 18 pitted ahead of Bates to take the lead. When the Matt Stone Racing rookie pulled into pit lane on the next lap, De Pasquale came out ahead. It seemed to be the defining moment for a De Pasquale victory – until it became apparent there had been a huge error in the pit stop and De Pasquale did not have enough fuel to get to the end of the race.
With a comfortable lead on Bates in second, De Pasquale was coached to conserve what fuel he had.
Then, in almost the same spot as teammate Ryan Wood crashed out on Friday, defending Supercars champion and two-time Bathurst 1000 winner Chaz Mostert drove his Toyota into the wall at Forrest’s Elbow.
Queue the safety car.
“I’ve never cheered so hard for a safety car in my life,” Hazelwood said. “The whole garage just went absolutely berserk. It was pretty cool. I’m looking forward to watching that back because it was a pretty special moment.
When the race restarted, De Pasquale looked like he might be able to hold off Kostecki, but on the last lap his Chevrolet slowed up Mountain Straight and that was the end of his challenge as Kostecki shot past in his Ford Mustang.
“The car was just a jet the whole race,” Kostecki said. “I’m still in shock.”
Will Brown and Scott Pye finished second and Zach Bates and Aaron Seton were third.
In one final bit of ignominy, De Pasquale’s Chevrolet did not quite make it back down Mount Panorama to the finish line.
“We dropped the ball at the last moment. You don’t get any closer to having it in the bank,” Team 18’s Adrian Burgess said, adding that the safety car offered a glimmer of hope even if proving to be unhelpful in the end.
“We we’re f—ed already – we knew we were. We were trying to manage it when that came. Obviously we thought, ‘Great, here we go, this is going to help’. But we sort of realised it probably wasn’t help enough.
“If it’d gone one more lap longer, we probably would have gotten home. But we shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place. We had the tools, we had the cars, we had the drivers … We had a f— up. It’s not acceptable, it’s not easy to deal with.”
