The 2024 Bathurst 1000 has been won by Brodie Kostecki and Todd Hazelwood driving an Erebus Motorsport Camaro. This race was noteworthy for two things:
1 - this was the fastest running of the 1000km event; with the distance being covered in 5 hours, 58 minutes, 3 seconds; at an average speed of 167.62 km/h (104.15mph).
2 - this race had exactly 2 lead changes when Kostecki brought the Camaro into the pits on lap 27 and was passed by Will Brown, and the retook the lead on lap later when Will Brown brought his Camaro into the pits on lap 28. Basically apart from pit cycles, this was was decided on lap 1, and any and all intrigue evaporated from the race by about lap 3.
You could have literally had a nap on lap 3, for five hours, and then woken up to find the order unchanged and the almost six hour procession unaltered.
In terms of sheer number of laps led, this is only second to the Brock/Richards demolition of all and sundry in the 1979 running of the event when they were fastest on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Claimed Pole, Led Every Lap, Won the race, and when Brock claimed the lap record on the last lap. In this respect, Kostecki's winding out of the lead to no more than about 30 seconds, and not even claiming the fastest lap, looks incomplete as that honour went to Broc Feeney.
What did this six hour procession prove? Quite literally nothing that we already didn't know. Camaros finishing 1-2-3 merely further demonstrates that the advantage that the Camaro has over the Mustang remains baked in; and the processional nature of the race also further serve to demonstrate that the cars themselves by virtue of being faster and more competent than every iteration of top-flight touring car racing in Australia which had come before, are ironically worse.
The Supercars are basically a bespoke GT3-Minus category, which are reasonably heavy compared to a GT3 car, have a completely adequate and competent aero package, and a bound box of rules which is so tight that any advantage which exists is permanent. Results like we saw at the 2024 Bathurst 1000 are frequent, common, and worst of all, boring as all get out. If you had tuned into the race expecting to see an intriguing battle, then you wasted six hours. There wasn't one. What's worst of all is that thanks to the sunk-cost fallacy, we are stuck with this for the foreseeable future.
What the Supercars category demonstrates on a mind-numbly boring repeated basis is that although you can invent a category of motor racing which is fast, it doesn't work a jot for producing anything interesting to watch. Yes, Brodie Kostecki and Todd Hazelwood drove their Camaro the fastest, but even they knew that provided they could maintain any kind of gap over the car in front, they would win. Ho hum. Yawn. Crick. Roll over.
Motor Racing generally reached the point where being aero dependent was already known to be a killer of intrigue by about 1985. Aerodynamics as applied to a racing car is a fluid dynamics question; specifically about how you make the air flow around all of the parts and pieces and about how you generate downforce which is mostly a suck-pull force underneath either the wings or the car body itself. That's all fine and good until you put lots of cars into a line and you then invent the phenomenon of "dirty air".
A wing works best in still and undisturbed air. When you put many cars in a line, whilst it is true that the one in the front punches a hole in the air which the others then all follow through, the turbulence which trails off in three dimensions is not amenable to the wings and things of the cars which follow. This is exactly like the wake and the waves which follow after a ferry as it bluntly and rudely crashes across the harbour and creates an unpleasant ride for all of the wee ickle sailboats who then get chucked about in the waves of the wave. If you then multiply that in three dimensions, then that is what is happening to the cars which follow.
This then creates the dilemma that a car immediately following at close quarters, no longer has the aerodynamic grip of the car in front; so the driver will back off some distance to regain the aerodynamic grip that they want. By definition, a car which is following at an increased distance is not racing closely with the car in front. If you then multiply that by two dozen, then what you get is what we saw in the 2024 Bathurst 1000; with 24 cars nominally following each other at about 5 second intervals all day long. In fact, the interval between the Kostecki/Hazlewood Camaro and the Feeney/Whincup Camaro, hovered between about 7 and 15 seconds for most of the day.
What is awful is that we should expect this again and again and again, and we get it again and again and again. The organisers of the category have fallen for the fallacy hook, line, and sinker, that fast cars always equal good racing. They do not. Time and time again, we prove that the funnest racing to watch, is with the most rubbishy of cars. We have Hyundai Excel racing which is frantic. We have TCR which is cut an thrust racing at close quarters. Formula Ford with practically no aero is about slicing cars through the air and maximising drivers skill. Supercars racing is now purely about dialling in an advantage and nothing else.
The category could be fixed by throwing away the cars en-masse and actually re-inventing the rubbishy cars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when three-box sedans ruled the roads. They were designed to put families in, to get groceries, and occasionally do big road trips which included dirt roads. They were not designed from the outset to go motor racing. A rubbishy three-box sedan thing with practically no aero whatsoever and maybe enough horsepower to yell down a Valhalla war-hell-ride, is what the public actually would like to see, because the fastest cars in this category ever wasn't really the funnest of things to watch. It was okay but boringly forgettable.
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