SHANE van Gisbergen cruised home on Sunday at Mount Panorama with the biggest Bathurst 1000-winning victory margin in 24 years.
A mix of speed and strategy allowed the #97 Triple Eight Camaro of van Gisbergen and fellow Kiwi Richie Stanaway to rise to the front of the pack ahead of the run home.
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But the final two stints were far from smooth sailing for the now three-time Bathurst winner, who battled a series of issues with his Red Bull Ampol machine.
Among them was his ongoing gripe about the feel from the Gen3 steering rack, and a few additional Great Race curveballs.
The latter included clumps of discarded rubber from the Soft tyres, which were being used at Bathurst for the first time in 2023, and fears of a gear lever mount failure that had already taken the other two Triple Eight cars out of contention.
“I had so many problems with the car at the end with the rack, the clutch, the last set of brakes wasn’t very good, and then rubber kept falling out of the splitter,” van Gisbergen said.
“They kept saying they were pulling footballs out of the splitter every pitstop, of rubber. I had one, five laps to go, fall out at the Cutting and it fell under the right rear tyre, and I had a big slide, so that wasn’t very nice.
“I just hoped the thing held together. And obviously my teammates were having the gearshift issues, so I was trying to be nice where I could, but it is what it is.”
Van Gisbergen’s closest pursuer in the final stint, Brodie Kostecki, also complained of an unusual feeling from his car in the penultimate stint, but was unsure if the cause was rubber or rack related.
Asked how he managed to stay focused through his own issues, van Gisbergen added: “It’s been the model all year.
“Everyone has got the same thing, so I just imagined that everyone else was having rack dramas and brake dramas.
“Luckily we had a buffer, and I didn’t have to drive on the limit.”
The combination of the high-degradation tyres and the lack of any Safety Car period in the second half of the race made the closing stages of this year’s Bathurst 1000 very different from recent years.
“It’s weird. You’re driving around doing 8s at the start of the stint when you could be doing 6s,” van Gisbergen noted.
“This car, you’re just driving around at 60 percent really, the whole stint, trying to manage the tyres and then hope you’ve got something left at the end.
“So, it’s very different here, different to the last few years where you’re just flatout for the last 400 kays or something.
“I miss that feeling a little bit, but we’re just cruising, trying not to drop into the marbles, really.”
Van Gisbergen, who previously won the race in 2020 and ’22 alongside Garth Tander, is not expected to return next year as he puts his focus on a switch to NASCAR racing in America.
