Bathurst winning panels restored to famous Ford

The Matt Payne/Garth Tander Bathurst winning Ford will forever sit in its race day panels, with Penrite Racing restoring the famous Mustang to its race day condition.

Penrite Racing famously won the all time great 2025 Repco Bathurst 1000 last October, with Payne surviving a wet weather affected epic.

Payne outlasted James Golding, Cooper Murray and David Reynolds, among others, to win his first Bathurst 1000, and Tander his sixth.

After Bathurst, Penrite Racing stripped the race day panels from the car before Payne completed the season in the chassis, GR-01.

The car, Grove Racing's first Gen3 Supercar, has been retired, its last race fittingly a win for Payne in Adelaide.

Ahead of the 2026 season, the team has refitted the Bathurst panels to the car, along with the #100 it carried.

The Grove squad is expected to build at least one new car for the 2026 season.

“We’ve had a great year. Winning Bathurst, both Matty Payne and Kai Allen winning races, and having Kai in contention through to the Grand Final,” Stephen Grove said last year.

“Most importantly, we can park the Bathurst car now. It will never race again. It’s the biggest trophy from this year."

Walkinshaw TWG Racing (formerly Walkinshaw Andretti United) also retired the Ford carried to championship victory by Chaz Mostert.

Mostert’s chassis, WR28, debuted at Newcastle 2023, when the Gen3 era began. He claimed the team’s first Ford win in Perth last year, but after being moved into a new chassis for the start of 2025, Mostert was shifted back into WR28 from Townsville.

At the time of the switch, WAU said WR29 would be rotated into a spare car for the remainder of the year, before being a spare as a team shifted to Toyota from 2026.

WR29 ends its time in Supercars with six wins, three of which came in last year’s Repco Supercars Finals Series, alongside 25 podiums in 67 starts.