Fast Facts: NTI Townsville 500

1) This event marks the 14th time the Repco Supercars Championship has held a round in the North Queensland city of Townsville. The first event was held in 2009 and the circuit has featured on the championship calendar every year since, including hosting two rounds during last year’s COVID-impacted 2020 season.

2) Mark Winterbottom will move clear into seventh place on the all-time ATCC/RSC round starts list at the NTI Townsville 500. The 244th start of his Repco Supercars Championship career moves him out of a tie with Todd Kelly.

3) The undisputed King of the Townsville streets will make his final race starts at the circuit in 2021. Jamie Whincup’s 12 victories (and 20 podium finishes) out of 29 races held to date at Reid Park put him well clear on the all-time list. The closest driver is his Red Bull Ampol Racing teammate Shane van Gisbergen, who has five race wins.

4) This year’s Townsville event is the second to have 500 kilometres of racing scheduled, but the first to feature the twin-250km race Super500 format. The last running of a Townsville 500 was in 2014 when Saturday’s action was split into a pair of 125km sprints and Sunday featured an 88-lap, 250km race.

5) Five drivers on the 2021 Repco Supercars Championship grid have started every single Townsville race since the first event in 2009: Jamie Whincup, Shane van Gisbergen, Mark Winterbottom, James Courtney and Fabian Coulthard.

6) The most recent Supercars race in Townsville set a new record for the lowest grid position to produce a race winner. Shane van Gisbergen charged from 12th on the grid to win the final race of Townsville’s second round in 2020.

7) Anton De Pasquale matched a rare piece of ATCC/RSC history in the last round at Hidden Valley. The Dick Johnson Racing driver took his third-straight ARMOR ALL Pole Position in the opening race in Darwin, thus joining Mark Skaife as the only two drivers to take their first three championship pole positions on the bounce.

8) The Townsville event has proven a happy hunting ground for first-time ARMOR ALL Pole Position winners. Lee Holdsworth took his first championship pole in the inaugural race in 2009, David Reynolds took his maiden career pole at Reid Park in 2012, and last year both Nick Percat and Todd Hazelwood took their first ‘main game’ pole positions in the two most recent races in Townsville.

9) The closest ARMOR ALL Pole Position-winning margin is a scant 0.0005-seconds. That is all that separated Jason Bright and Jamie Whincup after the Top 10 Shootout for the Sunday race in 2014; Craig Lowndes qualified faster than both but had lost his chance at pole due to a grid position penalty earnt the day before.

10) Erebus Motorsport pair Will Brown and Brodie Kostecki are the only drivers on the grid this weekend that are making their maiden Repco Supercars Championship starts in Townsville. While both have taken part in Dunlop Super2 Series rounds at Reid Park, the longest race either has done in Townsville was 21 laps long – less than a quarter of the distance of each race this weekend.