It should be obvious to all and sundry by now that the Australian Touring Car Championship, which is contested by the Supercars series, is very quickly choosing to become a failure; almost by design.
This is because of a number of reasons.
Firstly, the Australian motor industry is now non-existent and that means that there are no local cars to race in it any more, the replacement cars are the Camaro which is not only discontinued and no longer on sale, the Mustang which although you can buy is not available in this configuration, and the third make which will be joining them in 2026 is the Supra which just like the Camaro is discontinued and no longer on sale.
Secondly, in an effort to protect the existing teams, the management has decided to make the series a closed shop. The only way to get a drive in the Supercars series is to be a driver for an existing chartered team. Unless a charter comes up for sale, there is no way in.
Thirdly, because of falling revenues and falling attendances, Supercars' management has decided to make the series even harder to watch by placing even more races behind the paywall.
This has actually resulted in a talent drain with drivers heading overseas; the most noticeable being Shane Van Gisbergen who made the rational decision to drive in NASCAR.
I have a solution.
It mightn't be the best solution but it is the funnest; and fun is the cousin of good.
ROCKET BUNNIES
With the Bathurst 12 Hours being a GT3 race for high performance sports cars, and the Bathurst 1000 being a GT3 Minus race for a group of closed shop cars, this only leaves the Bathurst 6 Hours as the place where normal cars have a chance to compete.
Even then, the Bathurst 6 Hours has almost by default become the domain of BMW 2ers and 3ers in lieu of literally everyone else only wanting to produce Brodozer ObeCity FX4 trucks and SUVs, which the latter openly defy the first two letters of their three letter acronym.
Given this, Kia who along with Mazda are about the only sensible small cars left, have the opportunity to do the most hilarious thing ever - run their Picanto GT Rocket Bunny in the 6 hours.
One of the points of motor racing like this is to Race On Sunday And Sell On Monday. What we have witnessed over the last few years as everyone is only in the race sell carriers for increasingly obese children, is that they too have abandoned this principle. You are never going to see a Rav-4 on the racetrack, or an Everest, or a Tiggo, and to be fair, apart from Hilux and Ranger still driving car sales, the entire motor industry has successfully managed to get the general public so disinterested in cars that even Sell On Monday isn't really working.
The fun thing about running the Picanto GT in the Bathurst 6 Hours is that all of the engineering has already been done as evidenced by the Portuguese Picanto GT Cup car above. To turn one of these into what amounts to a GT4 Adjacent car which is what the regulations for the Bathurst 6 Hours runs under, literally requires zero effort. This is a simple matter of taking a car and just putting it on the racetrack. Maybe if Kia Australia wanted to, they could take some Right Hand Drive examples and fit the bits on them, but essentially what we have is a turnkey solution which is already in existence.
The then obvious question is as always: Why? Why would a car maker like Kia want to run their smallest car in a race like this and not their biggest and/or halo car like a Stinger? Because motor racing is about writing a story. Ford and Holden told us the story about family sedans in combat for fifty years and now they have vacated the stage. Subaru and Mitsubishi told us the story about their cars tearing through the forests and snow at ridiculous speeds but they too have abandoned the stage. Both the Bathurst 12 Hours and the Bathurst 1000 are currently filled with cars that the general public can not buy and will never likely drive; so the story is just not relevant. If Kia were to run the Picanto GT in the 6 Hours, then it comes with the inbuilt story of the little guy taking on the world and if they should win, then we'd have all the drama of a David/Goliath story. Kia actually have a strange opportunity to own all of the stage in the public imagination because literally nobody else wants to stand in the limelight.
If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else then I'd shake down the CEO of Kia Australia to consider running their wee ickle fun machine in competition. I'd paint the cars red with white roofs to at least hint at the Austin and Morris Mini Coopers that ran around the same mountain 60 years ago.
Because the story of wee ickle rocket bunnies is a lot more fun than the sad old git boxes that all y'all are driving around in.
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