WHICH trio of drivers has finished on the podium together the most number of times in the history of the Australian Touring Car/Supercars Championship?
It’s a very interesting one that we’ve pondered here at V8 Sleuth HQ ever since it was posed to us on Twitter by our mate Cam Kirby from Wheels magazine.
We’ve analysed our full database of championship results and come up with the three drivers who have shared the podium the greatest number of times in championship history.
And we should clarify, endurance races are part of the count too, so we haven’t limited things to single driver rounds. And drivers competing in the same car in an endurance race do count in the tally – after all, it’s a count of ‘on the podium’, not ‘how they got there’!
Also, the change in 2009 to each race having a podium rather than per round has also skewed the numbers to the modern V8 Supercars era, but numbers are numbers!
Jamie Whincup, Craig Lowndes and Mark Winterbottom is the most common podium trio in championship history with the trio finishing on the podium at the same time on 17 occasions.
The first was the 2006 Sandown 500 where Winterbottom won alongside Jason Bright and Lowndes and Whincup paired up to finish third.
The last time the three drivers finished on the podium together was in 2014 at Phillip Island.
However their record looks set to be topped very soon as the ‘next best’ trio is made up of three of the current front-runners in the championship – Whincup, Shane van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin.
They’ve finished on the podium together on 16 separate occasions, so need just two more podiums as a trio to take the new front-running in this section of the record book.
For those wondering, the next trio on the list is Whincup, Winterbottom and Will Davison, their 11 podiums shared largely during the 2011/2012 period when Triple Eight and Ford Performance Racing were highly successful.
When it comes to duos, it’s not surprising that Whincup and Lowndes have been on the podium together the most number of times in championship history – 70 in total – both racing against one another and sharing a car.
It’s no surprise that Whincup, who holds the record for most podium finishes in championship history, features in each of the top six ‘most podiums as a duo’ list. The list of drivers to share the most podiums with Whincup in championship history includes Lowndes (70), Mark Winterbottom (58), Shane van Gisbergen (55), Scott McLaughlin (45), Will Davison (36) and Garth Tander (35).
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