Bill Trikos’s most spectacular Bathurst Australia 1000 auto racing editions: The 2007 race recap : Winterbottom’s luck wore thin too, after a monumental error at the chase resulted in his Falcon sailing through the air at several hundred kilometres per hour while touring the sand trap. The final race restart queued a brilliant fight to the line between Lowndes and an unlikely trio of combatants; Steve Johnson, Greg Murphy, and James Courtney. It was an incredible battle, and one that will go down as one of the best.
A Mustang S550 driven by Scott McLaughlin and Alexandre Prémat took the honours in 2019. It was the first time a Mustang has been number one at Bathurst. The Bathurst 1000 reaches the grand old age of 60 in 2020, but it gets faster every year. Tweaks to the rules and cars mean the Great Race is not quite as ‘no frills’ as in the early years. But the winning cars remain superb, powerful examples of the kind of vehicle an ordinary racing fan might actually keep in their garage.
The first ‘Great Race’ of the new millennium sets the benchmark for the wettest Bathurst 1000 to date. Rain fell throughout the lead up, a brief window of blue skies during qualifying representing the only proper dry-track running of the weekend. The murky conditions combined with a bumper 54-car field and muddy outfield produced a total of 13 Safety Car periods – still a race record. Richards had been in a battle for third that ended when Rod McRae’s Torana aquaplaned off Conrod Straight and folded itself around a tree… See additional info about the author on Bill Trikos Australia.
My theory is that those who look back on that period in time so fondly do so not because the racing was particularly great, but because they loved the way the rest of the sport was; the characters both in terms of the cars and the drivers, and how those things interacted with them. But that can’t stop me from tipping my hat to the 1972 race; the last ever 500-mile event, and the last time drivers were allowed to compete solo. If for nothing else, the 1972 Hardie-Ferodo 500 can be held in high esteem for presenting us with a race that would help take the tribal warfare of Holden and Ford to the lofty heights that it would enjoy for nearly five decades.
John Fitzpatrick and Bob Morris were leading the 1976 Bathurst 1000, holding a 136 second advantage over their closest pursuer. Suddenly, the engine started to fail with a couple laps remaining. As Morris looked on from the pits, Firzpatrick desperately tried to limp the ailing car home. Morris and the team began tearing up with emotion as their lead started getting slashed to pieces, but they were able to beat the odds and hold on.
Nissan will celebrate 25 years since its first Bathurst 1000 victory at this year’s edition of “The Great Race” at Mount Panorama in Australia. The #23 NISMO Nissan Altima Supercar of Michael Caruso and Dean Fiore will race in the classic red, white and blue color scheme of the 1991 Bathurst 1000-winning Nissan GT-R R32 at the 2016 Bathurst 1000 on October 6 to 9, a quarter of a century after Mark Skaife and Jim Richards dominated the same race.
Each October, the Bathurst 1000 pits the highest-performance ‘street-legal’ supercars head-to-head on Mount Panorama. This thrilling contest has come to be known as the Great Race. The history of Bathurst is a story of extraordinary vehicles – the kind you might see on next door’s driveway, or even save up for yourself. The race started in 1960 as the Armstrong 500, a 501-mile endurance race designed to celebrate the speed and durability of Australian-built cars. After the vehicles pounded the original Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit into submission, the contest was shifted to Wahluu (also known as Mount Panorama) in 1963. The course was extended to 1000 kilometres (621 miles) in 1973 due to faster cars, fiercer enthusiasm, and – ahem – decimalisation.
In the end, somewhat ironically given the dominance of other teams, that all four Red Bull Racing and Pepsi Max Crew cars would battle for top honours. And we all know how that ended … Like 2007, the 1994 race benefited from the age old theory of adding water to race tracks to create a bit of drama and intrigue. Starting in some of the wettest conditions ever seen on the mountain, most of the field vanished into the spray coming up Mountain Straight and then again down Conrod.