This is an exclusive pre-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.
30 races down, 10 drivers left, and three of them won’t make it past the Gold Coast. It's Finals time!
What it takes to reach Sandown
Last year, it was ‘own goals’ that decided who went out in the first round of the finals. All three eliminations came down to reliability issues, penalties or driver errors. Thomas Randle took the last spot simply by staying out of trouble, finishing ninth and seventh. Not headline-grabbing, but that’s the point. In the first round of the finals, you don’t need to win. You need to not lose.
Look beyond last year and the data backs this up. Had the same finals format been used at every Gold Coast event in the last ten years, an average finish of 9.4 across the two races would’ve been enough to progress. That’s not a pair of podiums, or even top fives. It’s just two tidy results. There’s no guarantee it repeats this year, but history suggests a clean weekend will be rewarded with a ticket to Sandown.
The hardest place to pass
The Gold Coast is spectacular in plenty of ways, but no circuit on the calendar makes overtaking harder. That’s no surprise; it’s the nature of street circuits. They’re narrower, mistakes cost more, and passing opportunities are harder to execute.
At most tracks, a tyre advantage of around three or four laps doubles your chances of making a pass. At the Gold Coast, you need at least seven or eight laps for the same benefit. Creating an offset that big without giving away track position is difficult, which is what normally makes qualifying so critical here.
Throw in some wet weather, though, and the entire equation changes. The last time we had a wet race on the Gold Coast, we saw nearly four times as many overtakes as the day before in the dry.
Last year proved the Gen3 cars can handle big kerb strikes, get airborne and land without damage. What we haven’t seen is how they cope with constant glancing blows from tyre bundles.
The reintroduction of tyre bundles at the beach chicane will be a talking point all weekend. They’ll sit a full car width back from the kerb, but drivers will still hunt for the absolute limit to minimise lap time. The difference this year is that overstepping it won’t just trigger a shortcut on the timing system. It could mean damage to the car. A shortcut costs you a lap. Damage could cost a whole lot more than that.
Will Brown’s charge
Will Brown arrives on the Gold Coast as the form driver of the finalists. He’s scored more points than anyone over the last six races. He also hasn’t finished worse than fourth since his engine restrictor issue was resolved five races ago, a run of top fours he hasn’t strung together since the start of 2025.
Add to that the fact he’s overtaken more cars than anyone across the six Gen3 races on the Gold Coast, and everything points to him being right at the front this weekend.
Chaz Mostert’s déjà vu?
Chaz Mostert’s season to date looks a lot like the same point last year. His average race finish (9.9 this year vs 9.5 last year) and average qualifying position (9.5 vs 10.7) have him hovering around 10th both years.
But two numbers have changed, and his chances of back-to-back championships hinge on them.
The first is finishing races. To this point last year, he’d finished all but one. This year, he’s had three DNFs and a disqualification.
The second is overtaking. Mostert was the #1 ranked overtaker in each of the three previous Gen3 seasons, averaging 4.5 overtakes per race. This year he’s ranked fifth. That’s still near the top, but his average has dropped to 2.9 per race, more than a 35% drop.
The glass-half-full view: that’s still a mighty effort given the scale of the Toyota program he’s helped bring to life this season. The glass-half-empty view: he’ll need perfect reliability and an uptick in overtakes if he’s to make it to Adelaide.
Breakfast, Lunch, then a Shootout
Thomas Randle touched on the unique challenge facing the drivers with this weekend’s schedule. Putting some numbers to it, it’s been 17 years since a Top Ten Shootout was the opening Supercars session of the day. Those in the top 10 won’t have turned a wheel between qualifying finishing at 4:30pm on Friday and rolling out at 12:35pm on Saturday — a gap of just over 20 hours.
Add in the fact that Friday’s heavy rain is forecast to ease on Saturday, and their Shootout lap may also double as their first dry lap of the weekend. As far as I can tell, that hasn't happened once across the last 250 Shootouts.
“But they’re professionals,” I hear you say. “That’s why they get paid the big bucks.” Maybe so. But it’s not about whether they can do it, because they all will. It’s about doing it faster than the other nine.
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.
