Kostecki's 'big relief' in snapping DJR win drought
Brodie Kostecki snaps a 2 year winless run for Dick Johnson Racing
Reigning Bathurst winner pays tribute to efforts of DJR crew
Kostecki labels 2025 Soft tyre as biggest challenge this season
733 days.
That is how long it took for Dick Johnson Racing to take their second win of the Gen3 era thanks to Brodie Kostecki's sublime performance in Townsville this afternoon.
Kostecki's move to DJR was the biggest piece of the silly season puzzle into 2025With, bringing with him ex-Erebus engineers George Commins and Tom Moore, and Erebus-built chassis.
Whilst 2025 has been branded as a rebuilding year for DJR, it has been a tough slog for the Stapylton outfit, with the reigning Bathurst winner only recording four top 10's across the previous three events and nine races.
Pressure has been mounting on the team in recent weeks, with Anton De Pasquale's 2023 Townsville win looking set to remain the team's only Gen3 win for the foreseeable future.
Following his dominant lights-to-flag win on Friday, the 2023 Supercars champion admitted: "It's definitely a big relief.
"It's not from a lack of effort, while we haven't been running up the front, everyone down the whole pit lane works incredibly hard.
"Just because you do your best, it doesn't mean it's good enough at times, so we've been working hard to find out where our faults are.
"Just really proud of the whole group, we dig deep after every round and don't get down in the dumps. Morale has been really good, but we just haven't had the speed, so really happy to turn that around today."
Armed with his championship and Bathurst-winning engineering and chassis combination, many expected Kostecki would become a factor as the year wore on, with Supercars.com predicting he will defend his Bathurst crown in October.
Kostecki has pointed to the different characteristics of the 2025-spec Dunlop Soft tyre as something he and Commins have struggled to adapt to, however Friday running in Townsville represented a turning point.
"I guess some things we used to do in the past don't necessarily work on this new tyre, so we've been playing catch up a little bit.
"I guess going into this generation of car, we were pretty fortunate to be fast out of the gates, we didn't do too much learning we just ran our package and fine tuned it.
"I'm pretty happy with the philosophy we've got now. The car feels much better than it's been, and we were able to have some poles in New Zealand but the car was pretty horrific in the race, so the car had really great tyre life then."
On-track action tomorrow begins with Boost Mobile Qualifying at 10:00am AEST, before the Boost Mobile Top Ten Shootout at 12:05pm AEST, and Race 21 at 3:00pm AEST.
