This is an exclusive post-event Supercars.com column by championship-winning Race Engineer Scott Sinclair. Sinclair will preview and debrief each round of the 2026 Repco Supercars Championship from his own perspective.
I certainly feel for everyone at Team 18. After executing what looked like the perfect race, the dream of a maiden Bathurst victory unravelled in seconds.
That said, we could easily be saying the exact same thing about the Shell V-Power Racing Team had Team 18’s heartbreak not handed them a reprieve from their own earlier dramas.
Sunday at Bathurst once again proved that Mount Panorama rarely writes a straightforward script.
How the #18’s day unravelled
Team 18 has publicly pointed to a glitch in their fuel strategy software as the culprit behind the heartbreak for Anton De Pasquale and Lee Holdsworth in the #18 Camaro. Without knowing the exact details, the timing data still gives us some insight into how such a costly calculation error could occur.
First, some context. In endurance racing, when you pit for fuel, you typically fill the tank. The primary reason is protection against a Safety Car, which compresses the field and cancels out any advantage you’d gained by short-filling.
A secondary reason is certainty. The cars don’t have fuel level sensors, so fuel is tracked by calculation. Fill the tank and you know exactly what’s in it. A series of short fills through the day can allow variance to creep into those calculations.
It’s like driving a road car with a broken fuel gauge. Fill it to the brim and reset the trip computer, and you know where you stand. Top it up with $20 here and there, and you’re relying entirely on the calculations to keep up.
The only reason you wouldn’t fill the tank is to gain, or hold, track position on someone you can’t otherwise overtake.
The #18 Camaro stopped six times for fuel, the same strategy as those it was racing at the front. At each of the first four stops, the tank was filled.
Stop five, on lap 123, was different. The car was short-filled by around three seconds, the equivalent of roughly 12 litres, or 2.5 laps of fuel. That was either the first sign of trouble, or an attempt to undercut the #888 of Will Brown and Scott Pye, which #18 had been stuck behind for most of the previous stint.
That short fill brought them out four seconds ahead of #888, a gap they stretched over the next 15 laps. If the short fill was deliberate, it had worked. If it wasn’t, they still had the final stop to correct it.
At that final stop on lap 138, the amount of fuel added was enough to make the finish had the tank been filled at the previous stop. Because it hadn't, they were effectively 12 litres short.
Given the tank was filled at each of the first four stops, you’d surmise the issue crept in around that short fill on lap 123. Exactly how, I can only hypothesise. One possibility is that the software treated the short fill as a full fill. If so, it would’ve believed the car had 12 litres more on board than it actually did, and every fuel calculation from there on would’ve carried that error — fatally miscalculating what was needed at the final stop.
It may well have been something completely different. Whatever the cause, the flow-on effect was the same: the fuel they believed they needed for the final stint and the fuel they actually needed didn’t match, cruelly robbing them of the race win.
#17’s knockdown and bounce-back
Brodie Kostecki and Todd Hazelwood had the race won, then they didn’t, then they did. The moment their hopes of a second win together looked lost came on lap 124.
The decision to change brakes on the #17 Mustang at their second-last stop was a brave one, given the brake issues teams had suffered all weekend. At that point, they were in control of the race and had already changed brakes once, on lap 72. That first brake change appeared seamless, so the team would’ve had no reason to believe another, much closer to the end, would be a problem.
When they pitted to complete that second change, however, it didn’t go to plan. The pit stop expected to take 35 seconds blew out to 66, dropping them well off the lead and seemingly ending their shot at victory.
While they ultimately returned to the lead and won another classic Bathurst, the team should scrutinise the decision and execution of that late brake change as closely as they would have had it cost them the win. I’m not suggesting it was the wrong call, but they certainly dodged a bullet. Fortunately for them, they can debrief it with the Peter Brock Trophy on the table.
How the Mountain decided the winner
There are always key moments in the Great Race you can only put down to luck — often good fortune for one competitor, heartbreak for another.
One of those came after Chaz Mostert’s crash. He drove his car 100 metres down the hill from where it hit the wall and parked it where it could be dragged off the track easily, rather than having to be loaded onto a tow truck. Had the car stayed where it crashed, the Safety Car period would’ve extended at least another lap, and De Pasquale would likely have made it home.
It was the moment the mountain showed its hand. It dealt the good luck to Kostecki and Hazelwood, and the bad luck to De Pasquale and Holdsworth, in what was another crazy chapter in the book of Bathurst.
Scott Sinclair is one of the most respected voices in pit lane, famously engineering James Courtney to the 2010 championship with Dick Johnson Racing. Sinclair also spent stints at the Holden Racing Team and Kelly Racing, spent time on the Supercars Commission, and recently joined Supercars as a data analyst.
The views in this article do not necessarily express the opinions of Supercars, teams or drivers.
