'That baffled me': Bold strategy gambles raise eyebrows

A bold alternate strategy at The Bend raised eyebrows, with teams trying and failing to turn Sunday’s first enduro of the season on its head.

Supercars introduced a number of key changes to spice up the enduros, namely allowing freedom to which driver starts, increased minimum laps, and a reduced fuel tank capacity.

Three teams — Walkinshaw Andretti United, Penrite Racing and Blanchard Racing Team — went off piste with four-stop strategies.

The Chaz Mostert/Fabian Coulthard (starting 10th), Kai Allen/Dale Wood (starting 23rd) and Aaron Cameron/Zak Best (starting 18th) cars all opted for alternate strategies in a race that ultimately went Safety Car free.

The four-stop strategy was centred on having a fast car, but with the race running green, track position ultimately proved king.

Had a Safety Car been deployed late, it could have been a different story. Ultimately, Mostert/Coulthard led through the pit cycles, but finished eighth. Mostert was left "gutted" despite clinching his Finals spot, with WAU rolling the dice given their star driver's relative safety in the championship. Allen/Wood were 15th, and Cameron/Best 24th.

WAU Team Principal Carl Faux, who was parachuted in to engineer the Mostert Ford, admitted his car didn’t have enough pace to pull the gamble off.

"That was all we could do really. We tried an alternate strategy and it didn’t work for us,” Faux said.

"We had reasonable pace but were just not fast enough to make four stops work when the top blokes only did three. We were also a vital man down without Sam Scaffidi in the garage to steer the ship.”

PremiAir Racing sporting boss Ludo Lacroix was firm in his assessment of the four-stopper, labelling it “impossible.”

"I don’t think we made any strategy mistakes, we didn’t try the impossible of a four-stopper,” Lacroix said.

“We stayed simple in our task, and that would have put us in the 10 to 12/13 on the track and that would have been acceptable, but that wasn’t to be.”

From the driver’s seat, race winner Brodie Kostecki and Will Brown, who raced from 16th to fourth, were left flummoxed.

“What threw us off the most was, surely not, was Chaz and Kai did the four-stop strategy,” Brown said on his Lucky Dogs podcast.

“Why did they… was there anything on your numbers that said that was even possible? It wasn’t even on our horizon that anyone was going to do it. We didn’t think it was going to happen.

“Someone said to me you have to go seven-tenths a lap faster… I couldn’t have gone two-tenths a lap faster even if we did that."

Kostecki was able to control the pace in the final stints amid the threat from Cam Waters behind, and cited tyre pressures as being key behind being unable to push for longer than a four-stopper required.

The race winner’s final stint began with seven consecutive laps in the 1:52s before he finished the final laps in the 1:53s, save for one fast lap to break the back of Waters’s challenge.

“That was confusing,” Kostecki said.

“I don’t know who cooked that up, but that made no sense to me.“My last stint, I did a 52.1, but I could’ve done a low 51 if I really wanted to. But if I did two 51’s, my next lap probably would’ve been a high 52.

“The tyre pressures blow out so fast. How does a four stop work? You have to make up the time, but if you go out fast for three laps and blow your tyre pressures out, you’ve still got to do the... 12 to 17 laps in a stint.

“How does that work… that baffled me."

The season resumes in Bathurst on October 9-12. Tickets on sale now.