Ranked: How every co-driver performed at Bathurst

We’ve teamed up with data analytics firm The B Pillar to give you the inside line on who shone and who struggled at Mount Panorama.

As per our post-Sandown analysis, this study ingests all lap times from the race and filters out pit in/out laps, the opening lap and any other such anomalies.

The best 50 percent of those remaining representative laps are then used to create an average lap time for each driver.

The low tyre degradation and far fewer Safety Car interruptions makes this a cleaner comparison than that for Sandown.

RANKED: How every co-driver performed in the Sandown 500

MORE: Controversial Supercars co-driver weight rule explained

No data is perfect and it doesn’t fully consider variables like fuel saving and dirty air. So as always, buyer beware.

However, it’s the sort of data teams use to help analyse driver performance and makes for interesting reading.

It’s no surprise to see Hazelwood at the top of the best 50 percent analysis. He was the fastest co-driver on the 25 and 75 percent numbers too and among the top 10 for all drivers on all three metrics.

The South Australian had arguably the best car in the field and plenty of experience with it, including lining up as primary driver in place of Brodie Kostecki at the Bathurst 500 in February.

Erebus’ confidence in Hazelwood was such that they could split the stints through the day and only double-stint Kostecki home, rather than triple.

It appears no coincidence that the top five performing co-drivers were all in either Erebus or Triple Eight Camaros, which dominated the race as the fancied Fords faded.

Cooper Murray again proved he was the true lead driver in the Triple Eight wildcard, while Scott Pye, Jamie Whincup and Jayden Ojeda also appeared to make the most of the equipment they had.

Murray showed the same sort of speed that he did at Sandown, although unfortunately blotted his copybook by picking up a penalty for exceeding the 80km/h yellow flag speed.

Super2 star Kai Allen is an impressive best-of-the-rest on this list, bouncing back from a tough Sandown to put in a couple of strong stints aboard the #17 Dick Johnson Racing Ford at Bathurst.

Experienced campaigners fill the remainder of the top 10 here: Garth Tander (#19 Grove Ford), Fabian Coulthard (#2 WAU Ford), Dale Wood (#26 Grove Ford) and Tony D’Alberto (#11 DJR Ford).

Eight of the 10 were also in the top 10 of this ranking at Sandown.

Allen and Wood (who did not turn a lap at Sandown) are the additions, while James Moffat (#6 Tickford Ford) and David Russell (#31 PremiAir Chevrolet) dropped out.

At the foot of the order is Warren Luff, who was dealing with a #20 Team 18 Camaro still showing the effects of its qualifying bellringer in the hands of David Reynolds.

Our second table takes the 50 percent metric detailed above for both the primary driver and co-driver to compare performances within the same car.

This makes for encouraging reading for a bunch of rising stars, with Murray, Allen, Ojeda, Cameron McLeod and Aaron Cameron (who triple-stinted and did the most laps of any co-driver) all shaping up well against their primaries.

McLeod was 11th on the earlier co-driver ranker too. Although not contesting the Super2 races over the weekend, his experience at Bathurst in various machinery appeared to serve him well.

Only Murray was quicker than his primary on these numbers, whereas four part-timers came out ahead in this analysis at Sandown.

Coulthard’s speed and experience shone through against Ryan Wood, who did not complete a lap in either of the Bathurst 500 races in February.

Jack Perkins – a two-time race winner in Super2 this year – also showed his class in a struggling BRT Mustang to shadow 2010 Supercars champion James Courtney.

Notable here is that the gap from Whincup to Feeney was far greater than between Pye and Brown. This is due to Feeney’s superior pace over Brown, particularly in the final stint.

Feeney was in fact the fastest of all drivers on the 50 percent metric ahead of Kostecki, Waters, Brown, Golding, Mostert, Stanaway, De Pasquale, Hazelwood and Le Brocq.

Interestingly, Triple Eight ran different strategies for its co-drivers; double-stinting Whincup and getting his laps done early, whereas Pye did his running in two lots.

The two highest finishing Fords – the Waters/Moffat and Mostert/Holdsworth entries – also ran the co-driver double-stint strategy to let their primaries triple to the end.

Holdsworth was the 13th ranked co-driver on our list at both Sandown and Bathurst, but the latter performance came in a car that was less competitive than it had been at the Melbourne enduro.

That’s the endurance season run and done for another year.

The co-drivers holding the biggest trophies – Pye at Sandown and Hazelwood at Bathurst – were both fresh out of full-time duties, underlining the second chance career opportunity that the enduros bring.

Just seven pairings carried over from 2023 to ’24 and we’ll see how much co-driver churn occurs in the coming months as the latest outcasts from the full-time field filter onto the market.

The B Pillar is a UK-based data analytics business, focusing primarily on GT and endurance racing, covering more than 40 series across six continents. Their clients are drivers, teams, managers, and the media to provide discerning and applicable insights into driver and team performance.