Bathurst 1000 trackside report 2024

Bathurst 1000. If there’s a race everyone wants to win every year, it’s this one. Thousands of kilometres of racing on Australia’s most iconic racetrack.

The normal race weekend festivities are swapped out for a week-long motorsport enthusiast event, kicking things off on the Tuesday with team trucks driving through the streets of the busy town. Wednesday featured the ‘track to town’ event with fans getting the chance to see all 26 cars up close and personal, as well as meeting all 52 drivers competing in the biggest weekend of racing of the year. Actual track time started on Thursday with practice 1 being for main drivers, and practice 2 being for co-drivers to get up to speed with the track and different setups, optimising the most out of the cars. Optus driver Chaz Mostert finished the Thursday practice session in 8^th while co-driver Lee Holdsworth finished his session in 15^th, leaving the team with lots of valuable data, and a lot of homework to do overnight in order to improve overall pace in the car.

Friday included two practice sessions and qualifying, with everyone’s focus being put into ‘one lap pace’, hoping that they’d find themselves in the top ten for the shootout on Saturday afternoon. ‘The Mobil 1 Optus rocket’ flew into qualifying ending up 6^th overall, giving Chaz the opportunity to improve on his previous time and position.

Saturday, similar to Friday, included two practice sessions and a qualifying, this time being the top 10 shootout. The co-driver session as well as main driver session really proved that the top 10 shootout was really anyone’s game. Chaz gave it all he had in his lap but overall, was only fast enough for a P9 starting position, meaning strategy was going to make or break this race.

Sunday - the biggest day of the whole calendar finally rolled around. The Great Race, 161 laps of Supercar racing. The race got underway, with Chaz maintaining 9^th and slowly starting to move up the order before handing over to Lee Holdsworth. 

After a new record of 132 laps of clean racing and no incidents around Mount Panorama, the first safety car was deployed when Matt Payne put his Mustang in the fence at The Cutting. The WAU team took the opportunity to pit and hand the reins back over to Chaz for the remainer of the race, leaving him to chase after his previous teammate Cam Waters. He eventually ran out of laps to get the job done but finished in a very respectable 5^th for the 2024 Bathurst 1000. Climbing four positions in a race with only a single safety car and struggling for real race pace all day is an excellent outcome and the boys should be very happy with their result.

The team have a quick turnaround to the Gold Coast 500 held from the 25- 27 October. The tight corners, concrete walls both sides and the notorious chicanes are sure to make for a great weekend of racing with hopefully a bit of silverware to show for the incredible amount of work and effort put into each race weekend.

I’ll be there, trackside and I can’t wait to see the mix of Supercars and palm trees for this iconic event.

See you on the Gold Coast!

Read our interview with Chaz about Bathurst and beyond. 

Ella Dingwall is a high school student with dreams of becoming a motorsport journalist.