It was a fast and intense battle that showcased the high skill level of the modern Supercars drivers and the professional nature of its teams.
Only one crash and not a single mechanical DNF over 161 laps of Mount Panorama is a testament to those factors and delivered as pure a sporting contest seen at the Great Race in 30 years.
However, to all bar the most ardent motor racing purist who laps up the detail of sector splits and anti-roll bar tweaks in pitstops, it was boring.
That’s bad news for the sport on its much trumpeted ‘stop the nation day’, where the public pauses to take in the spectacle and, ideally, decides to come back for more.
Why did it play out this way?
The short answer is that no Safety Cars (until lap 132) meant no action. Not all contests in any sport are crackers and we’ve been spoiled by Bathurst in recent years.
But Supercars cannot afford to simply shrug its shoulders and dismiss it on that basis. Gen3 has after all produced two dud Bathurst 1000s in a row.
To the category’s credit, it did act after the 2023 event. Supercars changed the tyre – going back to the hard compound after a year with the soft – and increased the refuelling rate to improve the show.
Supercars is opting for another tyre change again next year, moving to a soft compound that’s designed not to degrade in the way that softs traditionally do. But will that be enough?
Take a step back and it’s remarkable just how exciting the Great Race has been in the modern era when you look at some of the bigger picture factors at play.
The cars start in fastest-to-slowest order and the drivers and teams are now almost entirely professional, with only a single ‘privateer’ wildcard from the Super2 ranks among them.
Many drivers made mistakes in practice and qualifying, but when it mattered in the race the stars executed with robotic precision. The ‘man versus mountain’ battle is increasingly being won by man.
Now in the Gen3 era, the cars are mechanically identical. The setups are different car-to-car, so even teammates trend away from each over a long run, but their strengths and weaknesses are similar.
The sport has in many areas been perfected and professionalised to the point of painful in comparison to the variety of yesteryear. And these macro factors are not going to change anytime soon.
What has continued to make the Great Race great despite the prevailing headwinds of the modern era are the in-race variables.
These are the weather, wildlife and ‘what now?’ strategy scenarios that teams deal with throughout the day. The first two of these cannot be influenced, but the third can.
There were two elements of the 2024 Great Race that contributed to its failure: a rule dictating primary drivers must start and the introduction of the Full Course Yellow system.
The former robbed the race of its usual first stint mix-up between primary drivers and co-drivers. Sure, there were still mixed stints later on, but it limited the options.
That rule was introduced by Supercars to get the stars in the cars when the national spotlight is shining. But it hurt the whole show and gave only theoretical actual benefit.
The Full Course Yellow (or Safety Car slowdown) may seem an odd rule to highlight considering the race ran green for almost its entire duration, but it was the main reason teams did not go off-strategy.
It’s the mere threat of the FCY that is the issue. The incentive to pit early for an undercut was dramatically reduced due to the fear of others later doing so under an FCY deployment.
As the Sandown 500 showed, if you pit early under green and others then catch an FCY pitstop, you’re going straight to the back of the field.
So instead, the cars droned around and around until they were out of fuel, with many trying to save some juice and squeeze out an extra lap compared to their rivals.
Ironically, the only FCY/Safety Car in the race appeared to come at the worst possible time, just as Broc Feeney had been chomping into Brodie Kostecki’s lead and turning up the pressure.
Kostecki did a brilliant job of the FCY slowdown – sliding sideways at McPhillamy Park as he rung every last tenth from the 25-second window – to increase his gap over Feeney before pitting.
As evidenced again in co-driver practice, the slowdown has added danger to the SC procedure, as well as limiting strategies. Perhaps it’s time to drag this set of regulations to the recycle bin.
At the very least it needs to be refined such that it does not have this hugely detrimental impact on the entire race.
There are many other areas on both the sporting and technical sides that could be explored to help put the ‘great’ back into the Grace Race, from fuel tank size to increasing the slipstream effect.
What Supercars can’t afford to do is serve up the same recipe of regulations in 2025 and expect a different outcome. You can’t always rely on an echidna to turn up at just the right time.
Discussion about this post