This is the moment that the 2025 Supercars Championship was decided. It was not a piece of brilliant racing. It was not some hideous turn of fate which came about due to mechanical failure. It was not even some display of dominance which showed all and sundry that a new champion had arrived. Nope. It was an act of barbarism, aimed from the teammate of the eventual champion; directly and squarely at their rival. This was sheer cussed bloody mindedness and nothing else.
Fair play to Chaz Mostert who after waiting so very very long, finally has the second biggest prize in Australian Motorsport: the Australian Touring Car Championship. Literally everyone in Australia who cares a jot about motor racing knows that Bathurst is the only thing that truly writes your name into immortality, and that the ATCC title merely allows you to write a number 1 on the door.
Supercars Management, in an effort to market the sport have come up against the very real problem that when you take the sport off of free-to-air television, the number of eyeballs watching, falls off of a cliff. There has simply never been the same viewership numbers since 2013; since Lachlan Murdoch vampired Channel 10 and stripped all of the assets from it. Formula One also disappeared from free-to-air television at the same time.
With viewership numbers down to roughly a third of what they once were, advertising revenues have also fallen dramatically and the whole finals series is little more than a spork and cut and paste job from NASCAR in America. The problem is that after hiding the Supercars Championship safely behind a pay wall, not even a gimmick like this is enough to draw back the fans, much less attract new ones who they deliberately choose not to court, 12 years ago. Effectively there is almost a generation of missing fans.
For me this is a classic tale of "Hate The Game And Not The Player". I can not hate Chaz Mostert as the champion. I can not really find fault with Ryan Wood who deliberately punted Broc Feeney off the road, because while that's despicable that is the job that he was given and he did it to the best of his ability.
This is unlike Senna deliberately taking out Prost in 1989 through a moment of opportunity, or Senna deliberately taking out Prost in 1999 through an act of unabashed bastardry. This is closer in spirit to Matt Kenseth intentionally wrecking Joey Logano at Martinsville in 2015; where the sport had long since decided that pugilism was not only acceptable but actively encouraged. Nobody particularly hates Matt Kenseth for obvious and deliberate knavery, but as NASCAR has only added gimmick after gimmick, it did kind of herald the end of the NASCAR Cup Championship being worth anything. The fans hate it, the drivers only like it if they win, and the dam of legitimacy has long since given way.
It didn't help that Broc Feeney won 14 races in the year to Chaz Mostert's 4. It didn't help that Chaz Mostert famously had his car fail on Conrod Straight during the Bathurst 1000 and he went to get a beer with the fans during the race. It didn't help that parity problems meant that the Mustangs only started being semi useful after the mid-season tinkering. Had this been any other season since 1960, Broc Feeney would have been Champion with two races to spare and everyone would have been happy. Instead on the first outing, we get borky broken gamified result, and a championship which is tarnished.
Mind you, the Australian Touring Car Championship was always second fiddle to Bathurst. Even Peter Brock only won it three times; so it's not like there's a whole lot lost. For Broc Feeney to have lost the championship, not because he was beaten by a better driver but because the operation of the rules erased literally all the work that he had done previously, is purely a result of policy decisions made by Supercars' management. Play stupid games - win stupid prizes. This prize is truly stupid.
