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.
Penrite's strategy gamble
The big talking point from the weekend was how Matt Payne got that dislodged left rear home on Sunday. For me though, the pivotal moment came earlier, and it belonged to his engineer, Jack Bell.
Payne chased Broc Feeney down through the first stint but couldn't find a way past on equal tyres. When Feeney dived into the pits on lap 29, Payne had no option but to push on, build a tyre offset, and hope he could use it later in the race.
When he did pit, he came out four seconds behind Feeney and reeled him back in within 12 laps. Two laps of trying and still no way through. Then the call to pit, which caught Triple Eight and everyone watching by surprise.
That call turned the race on its head. Penrite cashed out their tyre advantage and, in an instant, converted a strategic battle into a head-to-head pit stop battle, knowing Feeney was always going to pit the next lap.
You can't overstate the significance of this call. You only had to look at how livid Feeney and Jamie Whincup were afterwards to understand it. They hadn't just been out-strategised, they'd been beaten in a straight pit lane fight.
Bell backed his pit crew to do the job Payne hadn’t been able to do on track. It was a big statement from the team. We already knew Payne and Kai Allen are elite drivers with fast cars underneath them. What we learnt on Sunday is that their engineers are prepared to put a race win in the hands of the pit crew, giving them another lever to pull when they need it.
I reckon we should introduce a 'Pit stop of the Year' award. The criteria isn’t the fastest stop, it’s the most meaningful one. Penrite's Sunday stop gets my vote.
Ryan Wood's highs and lows
Reliability robbed us of a three-way fight for the win on Sunday when Ryan Wood was struck down by an issue on the warmup lap. It was Wood’s third DNF of the year, the equal most of anyone.
From the moment Wood came into the championship it was clear he was fast. Across the first 83 races of his career, his qualifying performance is elite, averaging 8.92. For context, in the last 25 years, only Scott McLaughlin, Broc Feeney and James Courtney have bettered that over their first 83 races.
The races are a different story. He's failed to finish seven of those 83 starts, and in an era of near-bulletproof cars, that number carries more weight than it sounds. The average car in the very same races retired fewer than three times. Relative to the reliability of his era, Wood is failing to finish at more than two-and-a-half times that rate, making him the most retirement-prone driver (with at least 83 starts) in the last 25 years.
Here's hoping his reliability woes are behind him so we can see him convert that qualifying speed into the race results it warrants. If he gets through the next three events and secures a finals spot, anything's possible — as teammate Chaz Mostert proved last year.
Team 18's build
Anton De Pasquale's double podium is another tick for Team 18, who are showing far more consistent speed this year.
They've long been labelled a team that's good at a handful of tracks and nowhere else. They're rewriting that narrative in 2026, with podiums at Sydney, Symmons Plains and Wanneroo — three circuits they'd never previously stood on the podium at. De Pasquale’s also one of only two drivers to have completed every racing lap of the season.
His championship standing reflects it. At this point last year he was 897 points off the lead. This year it's 415, less than half.
What's changed isn't obvious from the outside, but three new podium tracks and a perfect lap count aren't a fluke.
The position nobody seems to want
The gap between 10th and 14th in the championship shrank over the weekend from 175 points to 132, and there are five drivers now fighting over that last finals spot. Of the five, Thomas Randle is the odd one out. He's the only one with a teammate already in the finals, and the only one who made it last year but currently sits outside. He hadn't finished a weekend inside the Top 10 since Sydney, but has done it at the last two events to re-establish himself as a contender.
Jack Le Brocq, James Golding, Andre Heimgartner and Jayden Ojeda are all their team's only chance. None of those four teams made the finals last year, so a berth would mean a lot in those garages.
Golding was on track to reclaim the spot he lost in Townsville until a pit stop issue cost him during Sunday's race, just one of many that have plagued this group through the year.
It does make for an interesting watch though. With the margins this tight and the points on offer at the endurance events, this one's going to the last lap at Bathurst. Again.
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.
