The greats Penrite Racing could join with Bathurst win

A second consecutive Bathurst victory would land Penrite Racing in rarified Great Race air.

The Grove Racing squad heads back to the Mountain as reigning champs, with Matt Payne and Garth Tander combining to win a barely believable 2025 race.

The retired Tander has been replaced by two-time Bathurst winner Will Davison, with Dale Wood making way for Tim Slade alongside Kai Allen.

The teams' championship leaders are firming as a team to beat come October 11, with Allen/Slade starring to second at the AirTouch 500 at The Bend, while Payne/Davison fought back to sixth amid incidents and penalties.

Victory for either Penrite Ford would make Grove Racing just the eighth different team in the 63-year history of the Great Race to go back-to-back, and just the fourth Ford team.

The Ford works team kicked off the Bathurst era with dual wins, before the late Allan Moffat reeled off two straight wins in the 1970s.

Remarkably, a Ford team wouldn't go back-to-back for over 30 years, when Triple Eight Race Engineering reeled off three straight. Only the Holden Dealer Team and Triple Eight have recorded three-peats, with Peter Brock doing it twice in HDT Holdens.

Gibson Motorsport powered to dual wins with the 'Godzilla' Nissan Skyline in the early 1990s, with Walkinshaw Commodores from the Holden Racing Team and Kmart Racing winning four straight across 2001 and 2004.

Ford Performance Racing (now Tickford Racing) recorded an unlikely double in 2013 and 2014, before Shane van Gisbergen led Triple Eight to Holden's last and the Chevrolet's first wins. The FPR double was Ford's last win streak in Bathurst.

Track action at Mount Panorama commences on Thursday October 8.

Consecutive Bathurst wins by a team