Dick Johnson Racing has rallied around its rookie amid a brutal first season in Supercars.
In every race that Kostecki has started this year, he’s only been beaten by Gray once.
Gray’s scorecard pales in comparison to Kostecki’s with just one top 10 finish across 23 starts to sit a lowly 19th in the standings.
Kostecki, meanwhile, has the most race wins of any driver this season with six. He has only finished outside the top 10 on three occasions.
Gray hasn’t been able to continue the trend of Super2 Series graduates who have found success almost immediately in Supercars.
Kostecki famously finished second in just his fifth Supercars race with Erebus Motorsport in 2021 and scored three podiums in his debut season.
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Will Brown was a race winner in his rookie campaign in 2021, and the same was true for Broc Feeney in 2022 with Triple Eight and Matt Payne in 2023 with Grove Racing.
Neither Ryan Wood nor Kai Allen were able to win in their rookie seasons, though Wood was a podium contender in 2024 and Allen was a five-time podium finisher in 2025 en route to the Adelaide Grand Final.
There is still time in the season for Gray to tick those boxes, whether that be a top five or a podium or even a win.
Gray’s struggles should, however, best be compared against his fellow Super2 graduates: Zach Bates, Jackson Walls and Jobe Stewart.
Bates is the best of the quartet, sitting 17th in the drivers’ championship for Matt Stone Racing and only marginally ahead of Gray in 19th.
Walls is second-to-last in some of the grid’s best equipment behind the wheel of a Triple Eight Ford Mustang.
Stewart, meanwhile, is last in an Erebus Motorsport camp that could be best described as being in a rebuilding phase with the rookie and second-year full-timer Cooper Murray.
Despite the doom and gloom on paper, Gray showed glimpses of speed at the Townsville 500 where he cracked the Top 10 Shootout on Saturday.
On used tyres, he qualified 10th before a mechanical failure relegated him to 16th. Gray bookended that result with finishes of 17th and 15th on Friday and Sunday.
Speaking at Reid Park, Kostecki came to Gray’s defence when the 2023 champion was labelled a “one-man band” by Supercars driver-turned-presenter James Courtney.
“It’s obviously pretty tough. Rylan is still quite young and he still lacks a lot of experience,” said Kostecki on the Fox Sports broadcast after his Sunday race win.
“[On Saturday] he did a great job getting into the Shootout and unfortunately broke a rollbar blade two laps into the race. He had a shocker in the race.
“[On Sunday] he made a little mistake in qualifying. He was only a tenth-and-a-half off me before the mistake.
“He’s showing all the signs, he’s just got to strap it all together and get the monkey off his back and he’ll be away firing.
“He’ll get there, he just needs a little bit of time.
“He’s got a lot of support from the team, which is great. I’ve been trying to help as much as I can.
“The cars have been really, really fast. Once he works it out, he’ll be up the front with me.”
On Thursday in Townsville, DJR team manager Tom Moore addressed Gray’s performance at the Darwin Triple Crown where he went up against Todd Hazelwood amid Kostecki’s illness absence.
Hazelwood out-qualified Gray and beat him in Sunday’s race.
The presiding theme in Gray’s development is minimising mistakes in qualifying, according to Moore.
“Rylan was top five and six for three of those first four (qualifying) runs, and we were really quite looking forward, going yep, this is a shoo-in for the shootout here and unfortunately he just made a mistake on that last run at Turn 1 to go through to the shootout,” Moore explained.
“Internally, it didn’t look like what it looked like on the outside. That’s the benchmark that we’re assessing him on. The assessment we’re tracking is how his qualifying performance has been going. That’s the hardest part of our category.”
Moore said Gray was well aware of the optics of being beaten by the ring-in Hazelwood, but tempered that by noting their relative experience.
“Rylan was quite a bit quicker than Todd throughout most of those runs and just made a mistake unfortunately at the wrong time,” said Moore.
“Todd was building himself up to it and was more consistent but with pace wasn’t quite as fast as rylan across the session.
“On paper it looked like he outperformed him in that regard – and Rylan certainly felt that, he got out and went ‘This looks really bad for me’, but there’s no pressure from out point of view.
“We’re still very very happy with where he is. He’s meeting those expectations.”
Supercars continues its season with the Perth Super440 at Wanneroo Raceway on July 31-August 2.
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