It all comes down to Adelaide.
At one of Australia’s best recognised street circuits, title leader Brodie Kostecki and defending champion Shane van Gisbergen will duel for the biggest prize in Australian motorsport.
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With the teams championship also in dispute between Erebus and Triple Eight, this weekend’s Adelaide 500 promises to be the biggest weekend of the season.
With some wild weather on the cards and history up for grabs, who will hold their nerve and claim the crown?
THE PERMUTATIONS
First, some maths.
There are 300 points available spread across Adelaide’s twin 250-kilometre races on Saturday and Sunday.
Kostecki arrives in Adelaide with a formidable 131-point lead over Van Gisbergen.
It means the Erebus driver is comfortably within reach of sealing the deal on Saturday afternoon with one race to spare.
The 26-year-old needs to outscore Van Gisbergen by only 20 points to be assured of victory in the first race of the weekend.
That means Kostecki will be champion if he finishes Saturday:
– first with Van Gisbergen third or lower;
– second with Van Gisbergen fifth or lower;
– third with Van Gisbergen sixth or lower;
– fourth or fifth with Van Gisbergen at least three places behind;
– sixth to eighth with Van Gisbergen at least four places behind;
– ninth with Van Gisbergen at least at least five places behind;
– 10th with Van Gisbergen at least at least six places behind; or
– 11th or lower with Van Gisbergen at least seven places behind;
Kostecki will be champion if he finishes the race and Van Gisbergen fails to score.
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WHY BRODIE CAN WIN IT
As you can probably tell from the above permutations, Kostecki arrives in Adelaide as the overwhelming title favourite.
His points margin is already close to unassailable. Even if he can’t seal the deal on Saturday, it would take a disaster for him to miss out come Sunday.
Even if this weekend’s results reflected his and Van Gisbergen’s average finishing positions for the season, he would comfortably take the title.
After 26 races Kostecki has an average finishing position of 4.96. SVG takes the flag on average at 3.75.
If those results played out this weekend — pairs of fifths and fourth for each driver respectively — Kostecki would cruise to a comfortable 113-point championship triumph.
And he’s in this position because he’s been the form man of the season.
No driver has collected more than his six victories. The next best is Van Gisbergen, with five.
No driver has finished on the podium anywhere near his 18 visits. Again Van Gisbergen is closest, with 11 rostrums.
He’s the only driver to rack up a three-win streak this year, and his run of seven podiums early in the season is unmatched.
Kostecki has also had a clean sheet of finishes without a DNF, albeit suffering some low scores with reliability issues and crash damage.
Consistency makes points. Points makes titles.
Everything suggests that process will pay off this weekend.
WHY SHANE CAN WIN IT
But even a slim chance is still a chance, and so long as Van Gisbergen is in the fight, he can’t be discounted.
The reigning champion has reasonable history in Adelaide.
He’s an eight-time pole getter, including on Sunday in 2020, and a five-time winner, including four back-to-back pole-to-flag sweeps in 2017 and 2018. He was the overall round winner in both those seasons as well as in 2013.
He’s also the form man of the two around street tracks, with an average finishing position of 3.40 to Kostecki’s 6.17 — excluding Melbourne, which is too great an outlier to be considered in the same class as the category’s other street tracks. It’s still not enough on its own to make the difference, but it’s a start.
Experience always counts in title battles, even when the margin is large. SVG has been here plenty of times before as a triple champion; Kostecki is in just his third full-time Supercars season, and this would be the first championship of his racing career.
And while Van Gisbergen can’t claim momentum is on his side, the context of this final weekend might lend itself to him turning in a big result.
There’s a freedom that comes with being the underdog. It’s also his final round in the Supercars championship for the foreseeable future, with his NASCAR career beckoning next season.
A pair of wins in Adelaide wouldn’t be enough to seal the deal of course, but it would take only one bout of misfortune on Kostecki’s part to bring the pursuer right back into the title fight.
“Our title doesn’t depend on us; it depends on him,” he told the Speedcafe Newscast podcast. “We just lost too many points early in the year, even from the first race.
“We’re too far behind to win it on merit. He needs to make a mistake.
“I’m not going there hoping for him to make a mistake.
“I haven’t obviously given up, but something needs to go wrong for him, which I can’t cheer for.
“If I get two good results, maybe something happens, but I have no influence on what he does, really.”
But it would be unfair to say a bout of Kostecki bad luck would give him an unmeritorious shot at the title. SVG, after all, is the only one of the two to have suffered a DNF and a disqualification, the latter from the lead due to a technical breach totally beyond his control.
While Kostecki has suffered bad luck of his own, he’s scored points in every race.
If he were to fail to finish on Saturday, for example, it would bring Van Gisbergen back to approximately level points if he finished inside the top five. Then it would be game on for Sunday, when the pressure would suddenly be ratcheted up to maximum and it would be anyone’s game.
It’s unlikely given Kostecki will have no interest in taking risks with his healthy points buffer, but stranger things have happened on the streets of Adelaide.
WHAT ABOUT THE TEAMS CHAMPIONSHIP?
The drivers championship battle will take place against the backdrop of Erebus and Triple Eight battling for the teams title.
Again it’s the reigning champion playing catch-up, having struggled to make a smooth transition from last year’s car to the all-new Gen3.
Erebus has nailed the brief this season, not only propelling Kostecki to a big championship lead but also most consistently rolling out of the truck with a car already well dialled in to the demands of any given circuit.
There’s no reason to think that won’t be the case again this weekend.
The flow of points is also with Erebus to close out the crown. Since the start of the endurance season at Sandown the current title leader has edged open the gap from 137 points to its current 170-point margin.
However, you could argue momentum is actually with Triple Eight. That slender 33-point gain is easily accounted for by Broc Feeney’ heartbreaking late-race technical fault at the Bathurst 1000, which dropped him from the lead battle to 23rd, a loss of approximately 200 points — enough to have already had T8 ahead.
There had been just 95 points between them before Mount Panorama.
The teammates to the championship contenders will be key here.
Former title leader Will Brown leads Broc Feeney by nine points thanks in part to Feeney’s Bathurst drama, and both will have their own reasons to go all-out for victory this weekend.
Brown is leaving Erebus — ironically to join Triple Eight — at the end of the season. Erebus is the team that gave him his first crack in the Supercars, dating back to his first co-drives in 2018, leading to his full-time debut in 2021.
Helping to deliver the team’s first championship — up from its best-ever finish of fourth in 2018 — would be a worthy way to sign off this chapter of his career.
Feeney, meanwhile, returns to the scene of his maiden Supercars victory this time last year. The now 21-year-old won on Sunday to close the season, making himself the last-ever winner in a Holden before the Gen3 regulations superseded the model with the Chevrolet Camaro.
Having looked like the driver with most title momentum in the middle of the season with a six-race podium streak spanning Tasmania to Townsville, Feeney also has a point to prove about just how much progress he’s made in his sophomore campaign.
You’d also expect there to be some bragging rights on the line if he can beat future teammate Brown in the drivers standings.
There are so many ways to slice the title-deciding Adelaide 500 this weekend, but no matter you cut it, there can only be one winner come Sunday night.