Source :- THE AGE NEWS
There aren’t many drivers who can claim to have won the Bathurst 1000 from last position on the grid. In fact, there are only two: Chaz Mostert and his then co-driver Paul Morris, who achieved the extraordinary feat in 2014 after taking the lead in the final lap of the race.
That’s why if anyone can win from 16th of 26 places on Sunday, it is Mostert. It’s also why if a Toyota is to win the Mount Panorama classic for the first time, Mostert believes he is the man to pull it off.
“I don’t see why it can’t,” Mostert, the defending Supercars champion and two-time Bathurst 1000 winner, said of his car.
The Japanese manufacturer, which returns to the Bathurst 1000 for the first time since 1998, has given Mostert and the Walkinshaw TWG Racing team a rocky 2026 so far – including one disqualification, three DNFs due to mechanical failures and one crash for Ryan Wood during a practice run on Friday.
But Mostert and co-driver Fabian Coulthard finally broke through to win in the GR Supra at Tailem Bend in South Australia last month.
“We’re obviously coming off a fantastic result, Tailem Bend,” Mostert said. “We’ve been working extremely hard all year and I feel like now driving this car throughout the year there’s been some rounds where we don’t really feel like we’ve been competitive or in one with the car.
“If it’s enough [to win Bathurst], I’m not sure. You just never really know around here. We’ve seen it 100 times, where the fastest car never wins this race. So as long as we’ve got a comfortable one, we’ll keep working on ourselves, we’ll hopefully just be in with the shot.”
Mostert can at least be confident of improving on his result from last year, when he failed to finish for the first time in 12 Bathurst 1000 starts. Mostert drowned his sorrows with spectators on the side of the track, sipping a beer while his Ford Mustang was carted away after an engine failure.
Mostert went on to win the Supercars Championship last year. It’s a big part of why, despite Friday’s mishap, Walkinshaw chief executive Bruce Stewart is optimistic his team will be celebrating come Sunday afternoon.
“You never come to Bathurst without thinking you can win. So of course we can,” Stewart said. “We won at the last event at Tailem Bend. This is 1000 [kilometres], that was 500, but I know we’ve got a great car, great engine, much stronger now, and a great team and an amazing driving pairing.
“These cars have come together in such a fast amount of time and there’s heart being put into it, blood, sweat and tears of these guys and girls in the team not only in the design and the engineering of it but in the building and the prototyping of it and in the testing we were allowed to do and in that respect, everyone in our team has dedicated themselves to it.”
Of course, for Mostert, it’s not all about the car.
“The view looks a little bit different, the engine obviously sounds a bit different. So there’s always these little differences, but it still feels like you’re driving an angry supercar around here,” he said.
This masthead travelled to Bathurst as a guest of the Repco Supercars Championship.
