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Richie Stanaway has described winning the Bathurst 1000 as a “surreal” experience after a turbulent beginning to his Supercars career and two years in the wilderness.
The 31-year-old paired up with Shane van Gisbergen to win the 2023 Repco Bathurst 1000 for Red Bull Ampol Racing, the latest chapter in a remarkable career – for good reasons and bad.
It was just his third race back in Supercars after two full seasons out of the category, yet he had already signed a deal to return to full-time competition in 2024 with Penrite Racing before the 2023 enduros got underway.
The absence from the category was something of a self-imposed exile, with Stanaway “call[ing] it a day” on his motorsport career in the hours after the 2019 season finale.
By then, however, he had endured a fractious rookie campaign with Tickford Racing and a controversial year at Garry Rogers Motorsport, including being benched from a race on the Gold Coast after missing a signing session.
After a Boost Mobile-backed wildcard for the 2022 Bathurst 1000 got him back into the sport, Stanaway was picked up by Supercars’ biggest team for the enduros and can now count himself as a Great Race winner.
“It was a pretty rough time, to be honest, when I stopped racing,” he recalled.
“If you’d asked me a couple years ago if I’d be here on the top step [of the podium] at Bathurst, I would have said it felt like a million miles away.
“It’s pretty surreal to be back here and I was just very fortunate to get the opportunity to do that wildcard last year.
“Obviously that led on to the drive here at Red Bull Ampol Racing and then that’s led me back to racing full-time.
“It’s very satisfying to get things back on-track and I can’t wait to go racing full-time again.”
Van Gisbergen and Stanaway are the first all-Kiwi duo to win the Bathurst 1000 since Greg Murphy and Steven Richards did so in 1999.
It was also Murphy with whom Stanaway drove at Mount Panorama in last year’s Supercars showpiece, which he highlighted as a source of inspiration.
“It’s helped a lot driving, with both of them,” he said of van Gisbergen and Murphy.
“They’re just two of the most iconic drivers from New Zealand, so to drive with Greg last year was… I guess, yeah, I needed that inspiration to come back.
“Same again this year, driving with Shane; it’s just inspired me to get the most out of myself and come back and do things properly.”
The win is Stanaway’s second in a Supercars enduro after prevailing in the 2017 Sandown 500 as Cam Waters’ co-driver at Tickford Racing.
That achievement created considerable hype when the GP2 race winner went full-time in Supercars in 2018, even if the man himself was cautious about his prospects.
Ironically, as Stanaway’s redemption and a path back into full-time competition continues, van Gisbergen is on his way from Supercars to NASCAR in 2024 and hence his third Bathurst 1000 victory could very well be his last, at least for the foreseeable future.
