Taking pole position in a Bathurst 1000 shootout is the stuff of most racing drivers’ dreams.
But Brodie Kostecki isn’t that kind of guy.
“I don’t really dream,” he said after smashing the field by almost half a second. “I just know I’ve got a job to do.”
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Brodie blitzes shootout to seize pole | 02:36
Kostecki made good on all the weekend’s promise, unleashing the impressive pace Erebus has studiously generated over six practice sessions to put pole well beyond doubt.
He allowed himself a moment of jubilation with his team, but once the dust settled, reality dawned.
Pole lasts for only as long as it takes for the lights to go out.
All that matters is Sunday.
“We’ve done a good job all weekend,” he said. “The team’s done a good job.
“I’ve been saying you’ve just got to take this place one day at a time.
“One-sixty-one — you’ve just got to make it every lap.
“You’ve just got to complete every lap, make sure you’re there for the last stint, and we’ll take it from there.”
One more step to finish the job, but it just so happens to be the biggest step of all.
KOSTECKI IN A LEAGUE OF ONE
Kostecki was the unbackable favourite to take pole position heading into the sprint shootout — right up until the first corner.
With the sun setting in his eyes and his visor tear-off dirty, he missed his braking marker into he first turn and ran wide. At the end of the first sector he was down on Broc Feeney’s benchmark.
Was he cracking? Did doubt enter his mind about the rightfulness of his pole position?
Not even a bit.
“All the butterflies went away pretty quickly. I knew I had a job to do,” he said. “I knew I had probably a low [2 minutes 4 seconds] in me with the track conditions and the track temperature and what I did the day before, so I just had to execute.”
Sitting in the post-session press conference, Kostecki was calm and composed. He knew all along he was going to be sitting there.
“I think I lost 0.15 seconds just out of turn 1, but I knew my downhill sector — I run a delta on my dash — yesterday wasn’t that strong, so I knew I had a fair bit of time left in me,” he said, embarrassing further the rest of the field with his reserves of pure performance.
“The track does get a fair bit better as a shootout goes on, so I knew that I just had to not stuff it up from there and I knew that would put me in a pretty good spot come Conrod.
“Obviously we‘ve been really fast all weekend. We rolled the cars out of the truck and they were fast really stable straight away.”
The summary of all that is that he obliterated the field by 0.483 seconds but could have gone faster and would probably be faster again tomorrow.
Is there any hope for a competitive race?
Of course. This is Bathurst, and single-lap pace doesn’t win endurance races. Management is everything, and with he and co-driver David Russell targeting their first victory, conversion won’t come easy.
But speed is one thing Erebus clearly won’t have to worry about tomorrow, and that’s a big chunk of the job done.
‘I heard everyone cheering’ Kostecki | 02:06
FEENEY’S FANTASTIC FIRST
How did Broc Feeney — the 20-year-old sophomore driver paired with legend Jamie Whincup for the super-successful Triple Eight team — prepare for his first shootout lap of Mount Panorama?
“Me and Shane were playing eight-ball pool on our phones about 20 minutes before!” he said. “We were trying to keep nice and cool.”
It was a novel strategy but one that clearly worked for him. For half of the session Feeney was the shootout’s standout performer.
The Gold Coast native has been marked out for great things in the Supercars, and on its biggest stage he delivered an emphatic supporting argument to put Triple Eight in position for an unlikely pole.
His lap was visually aggressive, certainly compared to the more conservative time of teammate Shane van Gisbergen.
It delivered a lap fast enough to keep him in top spot when Kostecki embarked on the evening’s final lap.
“I was probably more nervous watching those guys do it than I was doing the lap,” he said of the excruciating 20 minutes or so watching driver after driver attempt to knock him off top spot.
“Pretty nerve-racking watching it, but there’s nothing you can do at that point. I was pretty stoked with what I did out there, so it was just up to those boys.
“I thought Brodie would get it, and then obviously he made a mistake at [turn 1] and I saw the delta go up, but then he clawed back real quick.”
How well does that bode for Sunday?
While Feeney has been patiently building up through the week to be in sizzling form on the eve of the Great Race, remember he’s also paired with Jamie Whincup, Supercars legend and four-time Bathurst winner.
Whincup will almost certainly start, and with all due respect to David Russell — who has been integral to Erebus finding such a superb sweet spot this weekend and deserves to start on pole — it’s not unfair to say you’d back the seven-time champion in a straight fight.
This combination won the Sandown 500 last round and is clearly peaking at the right time. It sets up Sunday to be a fascinating race.
‘Completely my fault’: Brown talks crash | 01:10
WILL THE PARITY DEBATE BLOW ON RACE DAY?
There were six Ford Mustang drivers in the top 10, but four of them were anchored to the bottom four and all were more than half a second slower than Brodie Kostecki.
True, everyone bar Feeney was at least 0.5 seconds adrift, but it’s not exactly encouraging when the Ford teams have parity concerns in the back of their mind.
Cam Waters will fly the flag from the second row on the grid after qualifying third, a lap built principally on an excellent middle sector.
But whereas Kostecki had more in his lap and Feeney is relatively new to the game, Waters somewhat dispiritingly said this is as fast as the Mustang can go.
“That was me tapped,” he said. “There was nothing else in that.”
The parity debate that coloured the weekend will come to a head in Sunday’s race. Throughout practice and even through qualifying the issue has bubbled along, but as had been the way this season, the Ford cars tend to represent reasonably well in qualifying, even, if the front row is usually just beyond reach.
It’s in the race — and there’s no race longer than this — that the issues Ford supposes it has will come to the fore.
And if the Mustang’s parity problems are as severe as the Blue Oval thinks, Ford’s Bathurst 1000 could be ugly.
“It‘s been the story of the year, hasn’t it — over a race distance we’re nowhere,” Waters said. “I still think we’ve got dramas and race-pace dramas.
“Hopefully we’ll have a bit of luck tomorrow.”
His approach?
“I’ll rag the thing for the time that I’m in the car and [co-driver James Moffat] will do the same, and hopefully something happens.”
It’s not the strategy Tickford would’ve wanted, but it might be the only one they’ve got.
Top 10 BRUTAL Bathurst 1000 crashes | 05:21
BATHURST ENTERS THE UNKNOWN
This is the 60th running of the Bathurst 1000, but this won’t be like other races.
The new Gen3 car and the soft tyres, in use for the first time this year, will change strategy considerably.
The fuel tank is around 20 per cent larger on the Gen3 car relative to last year, which should allow for longer stints. The new motors also have better fuel economy.
This year Supercars has axed the rule requiring a minimum number of pit stops, allowing teams free rein on strategy bar one compulsory brake pad change in the middle of the race.
But that combines with the soft tyre, which is more delicate than compounds previously used. What’s more, no-one has done a full-tank stint simulation this weekend.
It means the key variable of strategy — which inevitable decides the race — are completely unknown.
“These guys [at Erebus] have done some race runs, but we’ll find out,” Feeney said, acknowledging the unknown. “I don‘t know if we know the answer yet.”
Co-driver and Triple Eight team boss Jamie Whincup said he expected Bathurst to follow a different rhythm this year, with more teams strategising on the fly.
“It‘s a little bit different with the extra capacity in the fuel tank this year, so the strategy is a lot wider than it normally is,” he said.
“I don‘t think anyone knows exactly what they’re going to do, and we certainly don’t know what our opposition are going to do.
“We‘ll take the strategy close to our chest for now and work out what’s going to unfold as the day goes on.
“The good part about what‘s going to unfold tomorrow is we don’t know what’s going to happen, which is great.”