Supercars checked off the first half of its season with a weekend that had it all.
There was a fraught battle for the lead between old foes. A sudden heavy shower to shake up the field. An unexpected pole-getter on Saturday.
And most interesting of all, there was a sizeable championship swing on the drivers title table.
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The series heads to Sydney with the form guide less clear by the round and a fascinating fight at the front on its hands.
MISS: WILL BROWN
Will Brown leads the championship as the season’s best performer, but more important than his headline results has been his consistency at the top.
He’s won only three races — fewer than teammate Broc Feeney and only one more than Cameron Waters in fourth on the title table — but he’s only twice finished off the podium.
Townville was the biggest test yet of his consistency, and it ended up biting him and his title lead hard.
Brown struggled for single-lap pace all weekend. He was 13th in Saturday qualifying, missing the shootout completely, though a hugely impressive race allowed him to rescue a third place. It was four places ahead of Feeney, allowing him to make a small unlikely championship gain.
But Sunday was a regression. He qualified 17th, which is deep in the carbon fibre zone, and he paid dearly in the race with a crash with David Reynolds and the wall that effectively ended his afternoon.
Pitting for repairs dropped him to 24th, where he finished — stone-cold last.
“I didn’t realise Reynolds was there because I was focusing on [Mark] Winterbottom and making sure I kept a distance from him,” he said, per V8 Sleuth.
“I didn’t realise we were three wide and just moved across a little bit too far, which was completely my fault.”
The only saving grace was that Feeney failed to capitalise, stepping onto the podium in neither race.
But Brown found his title lead slashed all the same — to 78 points ahead of Feeney and 174 points ahead of Chaz Mostert.
It wasn’t a total write-off, but this is as close to a true dud weekend as we’ve seen from the title leader.
Waters wins classic battle over Mostert | 01:10
HIT: FORD HAS BIG WEEKEND
After the bitter disappointment of Darwin, most of Ford’s biggest teams bounced back to dominate the weekend.
Waters exercised his traditionally rapid one-lap pace to take pole on Saturday and duly converted in an epic ahead of Walkinshaw Andretti United’s Mostert later that afternoon. Tickford teammate Thomas Randle came close to joining him but for the late rain, finishing a strong fifth.
Waters came close to a repeat on Sunday from the front row but was bested by Matthew Payne in a big result for Grove. Mostert completed an all-Ford podium to close the weekend.
Grove’s victory is particularly meaningful as a team on the up and reinvented around young gun Payne and the returning Richie Stanaway.
It carries on from Grove’s strong podium-contending form late last year and backs up Payne’s maiden Supercars victory in Adelaide in November.
It validates the changes the team has been making to haul itself up the pecking order of Ford squads to the point it’s now one of the Blue Oval’s leading lights.
“It means so much to the team and it means so much for everybody that works here and also back at the factory,” team owner Stephen Grove said, per V8 Sleuth.
“l suppose the word is ‘belief’.
“We had a good start and then we had a bit of a grey patch.
“It’s making sure everybody believes that you can win, and this proves that we can win and it proves that all the hard work that we do behind the scenes works. It’s really, really great.”
It’s also a pleasing departure from the arguing over parity that coloured the first season of Gen3. With Ford winning four of the last six races and with four Ford squads chasing Triple Eight on the title table, the sport seems to have found its equilibrium.
“Obviously parity has become something that’s a little bit quieter this season,” said Ryan Walkinshaw. “At the moment every other round a different side of the camp, be it Ford or Chev, are complaining there are still parity issues. When you’ve got both sides complaining equally at each other, you’re probably doing something right.
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MISS: DICK JOHNSON RACING
Notable, however, was that Ford homologation team Dick Johnson Racing wasn’t among them battling at the front.
Townsville is the scene of the team’s last win, coming on Sunday here last year at the hands of Anton de Pasquale.
A repeat looked like it could’ve been on the cards when Will Davison took provisional pole on Saturday and converted to fourth in the shootout, but he slipped to eighth in the race and De Pasquale failed to finish.
Fifth and seventh in Sunday’s shootout yielded similarly disappointing results, with Davison 12th and De Pasquale a close 13th, strongly suggesting that was the maximum the car had.
“We keep putting the cars into the top 10 and getting a reasonable grid spot but not converting in the races,” team CEO David Noble said, per V8 Sleuth.
“We’re partway there, but partway is not good enough. That’s not going to win races or championships for us.
“We have to replicate our best pace on a regular basis, keep digging into the data, look at the best parts of what we’re achieving and keep moving forward.”
DJR is fifth in the teams championship and comfortably last among those leading Ford squads. Only Blanchard Team Racing is further adrift of Triple Eight.
Tyre life seems to be the team’s major Achilles heel. With the testing Sydney Motorsport Park up next in less than two weeks, any visible light is coming from the end of a very long tunnel.
Lewis ends 2-year drought with home win | 03:45
HIT: WATERS AND MOSTERT RENEW RIVALRY
Both Cam Waters and Chaz Mostert started the season hopeful that a championship battle could be on the cards, and while so far the title appears far away — for Waters at least; Mostert is closer to the lead battle — Saturday’s epic duel for victory was a timely reminder of what both are capable of when given the chance in a series increasingly dominated by young guns.
The battle was long-running, tactical, gripping and, most of all, clean.
That last point is crucial, because while no-one’s doubts the speed of either of these two, their ability to put their past rivalry behind them has remained an open question and a potential weakness in any title crap.
“Five years ago it might have been a different race,” Waters acknowledged. “But I’m glad it wasn’t.”
Not racing for the same team has undoubtedly helped, but maturity is part of the equation too.
It could prove to be their point of difference if the title fight does move towards them, with young guns Will Brown and Broc Feeney relatively fresher to the pointy end of the field.
Danny Ric ‘puzzled’ after tough race | 02:17
MISS: TRIPLE EIGHT AND FEENEY
Feeney arrived in Townsville riding a wave of confidence following a dominant weekend in Darwin, and while he walked away from the weekend with his championship deficit to Brown massively reduced, it should have been so much better a weekend for the 21-year-old, who was presented with open goals on both days but failed to capitalise.
Saturday will have been most disappointing, having started five places ahead of Brown but finishing four places back. It was reminiscent of his beating at the hands of his teammate in New Zealand, where he lacked pace in the final stint to seal the deal.
He clawed back significant points on Sunday, but seventh place meant a far bigger score was left on the table.
Compared to Brown’s metronomic consistency, Feeney has finished off the podium five times in the last eight races.
Some of that is down to the team’s form. His big misses have been in Taupō, where Triple Eight took until Sunday to find its speed, and again this weekend, where the Supercars powerhouse squad was never really in the mix.
That in itself is interesting. While the weaknesses haven’t been catastrophic, the field is close enough now to punish when they appear.
Feeney, though, might be thinking of the truism that titles are decided on your worst days. Though he gained points back from Brown, one wonders whether he’ll be lamenting he didn’t inflict more damage come the end of the season.
Lewis tears up after Silverstone triumph | 02:15
HIT: LE BROCQ AT EREBUS
Erebus’s title defence is hardly going the way it had hoped, and even the reintegration of Brodie Kostecki has done little to lift its form, albeit with a swath of technical issues hampering the defending champion.
But perhaps missed in the underwhelming start to the campaign is a quietly successful — and improving — first full-time season for Jack Le Brocq.
Though he’s yet to stand on the podium, only four times this season has Le Brocq failed to finish inside the top 10. It’s enough for him to run ninth in the title standings, doing most of the legwork to keep Erebus up to eighth in the teams standings and away from the wrong end of pit lane.
He’s the bar against which the team is being measured. In Townsville pole in the shootout and fourth in the race was heartening, suggesting Erebus isn’t too far away from striking the sort of form that so impressed in the first season of Gen3.