Hill lucky with rivals' Perth problems as Finals race heats up

On an afternoon of wild points swings in the battle to break into the top 10 for the Finals, Cameron Hill admits that he was lucky to leave the Bosch Power Tools Perth Super 440 eighth in the championship.

One of the breakout stars of the 2025 Repco Supercars Championship, Hill claimed his first career podium and victory in a breakout weekend at the Australian Grand Prix, and backed it up with more silverware in Taupō.

However, in the six races following that last trip to the rostrum, the Canberran has only finished inside the top 10 twice, one each at Tasmania and Perth.

Hill recorded finishes of ninth and 12th on Saturday, and looked set to claim a strong result in the 200km finale before he was left stranded on the grid as the formation lap commenced.

The crew at Matt Stone Racing changed the battery on the #4 Supaglass Camaro, but what was meant to be an eighth-place start for the 28-year-old turned into an eight lap headstart for the field.

"Not the finish that we were really hoping for, we qualified eighth, got into the Shootout, really cool to be in another Shootout," said Hill in a social media recap of his weekend.

"We qualified eighth in the Shootout, so today was looking pretty good, I thought we were on for a good result this afternoon, and then the car didn't start which was really bad.

"We tried to get the car fired, but we just lost too much time a few laps down. We got back out there, finished the race, we were probably a bit lucky with a few of our main rivals in the championship having a bad day."

It was a wild race in the battle for the Finals, as Ryan Wood, James Golding, and Anton De Pasquale also found trouble, when they all looked to be in position to jump into the top 10.

Having entered the weekend 19 points inside the cutoff in eighth, Hill's buffer has grown to 22 points, however the gap back to teammate Nick Percat in 13th is just 68 points.

MSR are set to investigate the cause of Hill's woes in Perth, however the 2021 Carrera Cup Australia champion is confident the same issue will not reoccur.

"We're still eighth in the points, so we'll take that. I think it wasn't a terrible weekend, it was really disappointing that we couldn't capitalise on our best qualifying of the weekend in the Sunday race," he added.

"On Saturday we didn't qualify great, but we had awesome races, we moved forward in both Race 1 and 2, so had we been able to execute today's race we probably would've walked away with our heads really high.

"That's motorsport, unfortunately something out of our control, we need to diagnose it. It was a bit of a weird one, the car cranked fine but just didn't fire, so need to understand to make sure we don't have that problem in the future."

The 2025 Repco Supercars Championship continues at the betr Darwin Triple Crown from June 20-22. Tickets for the event are on sale now.