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.
How did we get here?
The line from the movie Anchorman, "Boy, that escalated quickly," comes to mind when thinking about Sunday's race at The Bend.
The final result sums it up: none of the top five finishers started in the top five. That doesn't happen often. Prior to Sunday, it had happened only twice in the last decade, at Bathurst last year and Bathurst in 2016. The rain, and more so the intensity of it, was the primary cause.
Friday and Saturday had been subdued. Practice and qualifying passed with little drama, and there was no solid form guide to speak of, with most of the usual suspects up and down. Come Sunday morning, as the rain rolled in for the Warm Up, it was clear the teams had been caught by surprise.
If you had to pick someone, it would've been Brodie Kostecki and Todd Hazelwood. But once the race began, it quickly became clear the #17 Shell V-Power Mustang was well off the pace in the first stint, dropping back and effectively out of contention. They’ll be digging into the data back at the workshop to understand why, though often it's just a slight misalignment between set-up and tyre pressure in full-wet conditions — miss that window, and you simply can't generate the tyre temperature needed for grip.
For the #1 Mobil 1 Optus Toyota of Chaz Mostert and Fabian Coulthard, the start of the race was the opposite.
Did strategy or speed win it?
Coulthard started 11th, but his first two laps set their race up: seventh by the end of lap 1, fourth by the end of lap 2.
From there, Coulthard worked his way to the lead before they pitted under the Safety Cars on laps 45 and 53, putting Mostert in at the second of those stops. That dropped them to 10th on the road, but they benefited again on the restart. This time Mostert went from 10th to sixth in a single lap and was second within nine laps. With only the Erebus car of Jobe Stewart and Jarrod Hughes ahead, which was nearly out of fuel, Mostert was in command and putting a gap on the rest of the field.
So the answer was car speed more so than strategy. The seven spots Coulthard gained in the first two laps and the four Mostert gained on the lap 58 restart largely negated the effect of traffic, allowing that speed to shine.
It was only once all of that had played out and my head stopped spinning that it hit me: Toyota, the car that's battled engine reliability all year, was about to win an endurance race at its first attempt. A huge achievement on its own, but also a perfectly timed show of strength from the Walkinshaw TWG team, locking Mostert into the Finals and making Ryan Wood's progression a near formality.
BRT's strategy misstep
The disqualification of both Blanchard Racing Team cars for non-compliance with the minimum lap rule has significantly dented James Golding's chances of making the Finals. He loses 182 points, taking him from the driver most likely to secure that 10th spot to an outside chance.
The cause, as stated by the team, was that their timing software incorrectly calculated that the full scheduled distance would be completed within the race's time limit.
Whether that came from a coding issue or a human error entering the values, it should've been caught regardless, just through gut feel. Long before the race started, you could calculate there was only a 20-minute buffer between a green race and a time-certain finish. That's something that should be covered in strategy meetings and sit in the back of every engineer's mind, given the implications for strategy.
When the race starts wet, lap times are 10 seconds slower, and there are three Safety Car periods in the opening third, engineers must challenge anyone — or anything — claiming the race will still run full distance.
It's a big price to pay, and I'm disappointed for them. BRT have achieved more than anyone would've predicted this year and grown as the season's progressed. They'll be a better team for it, but it's a great reminder that as we increasingly rely on computers to 'do the sums', you still need someone interrogating what's being calculated.
Tim Slade's max steering lock save
Tim Slade's miraculous save on the lap 50 restart was one of many exhibitions of driving talent in Sunday's treacherous conditions. He'd just plucked fifth gear and was travelling at 213 km/h when the car got away from him. He immediately lifted off the throttle, applied some serious steering input to keep the car straight, and 2.3 seconds later, was back on it.
Those steering corrections included an amount of opposite lock equal to what's needed to get around the Symmons Plains hairpin. The only difference was the speed: 55km/h in Tasmania, 213km/h at The Bend.
Ahead of The Bend, I questioned what impact seat time in other categories really has on endurance preparation. Slade's World Time Attack laps just nine days earlier may well have paid off not only for him and his Penrite team, but for everyone following who'd have been caught up in the mess had he not kept it straight.
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.
