DJR Team Penske took its first Bathurst win since 1994, but a safety car controversy soon led to fines, lost points and a stripped pole time.
This Supercars race ran over four days in October 2019 and was the eleventh event of the championship. DJR Team Penske took the win with a pole-sitting car, but team orders penalties and later fines reshaped the official result and its standings.
Supercars ran the 2019 Bathurst 1000 from 10 to 13 October at Mount Panorama Circuit, near Bathurst in New South Wales. Scott McLaughlin and Alexandre Premat won from pole for DJR Team Penske, their first Bathurst 1000 win, although the race was soon overshadowed by a team orders case. Triple Eight's van Gisbergen and Tander crossed the line in second place.
Where and when was the 2019 Bathurst 1000 held?
The event ran over four days, from 10 to 13 October 2019, at Mount Panorama. It was the eleventh of fourteen events in the 2019 Supercars Championship, and it opened the 2019 Enduro Cup with a single 1000 kilometre race.
This was the 62nd edition of the Bathurst 1000. The event had begun at Phillip Island in 1960 as a 500-mile contest for Australian-made standard production sedans. It was the 59th time the race had been held at Mount Panorama and the 23rd running of the Australian 1000.
Steven Richards was making his last start in the race, having won it five times.
DJR Team Penske's first Bathurst win since 1994 came with a team orders investigation that reshaped the result.
Who was on the entry list?
Twenty-six cars were entered. Holden had the largest share of the grid, with 16 Commodores, while Ford fielded six Mustangs and Nissan four Altimas. Two wildcard entries joined the 24 regular-season entries, from Kostecki Brothers Racing and Walkinshaw Andretti United.
The Kostecki Brothers Racing wildcard was driven by cousins Jake and Brodie Kostecki, while Walkinshaw Andretti United fielded IndyCar drivers Alexander Rossi and James Hinchcliffe. Debutants numbered six, among them the four wildcard drivers plus Super2 competitors Thomas Randle and Jack Smith.
How did practice go for the big names?
Whincup led the first session with the quickest opening-session mark in the event's history, though the practice days produced plenty of incidents. Luke Youlden hit the wall at Sulman Park and was out for the day. The first co-driver session was marked by several off-track moments at the Chase.
Macauley Jones backed his Commodore into the Cutting wall, and Ashley Walsh locked up and brought out a red flag at Murray's Corner. Whincup then crashed at the Esses while avoiding Richie Stanaway, and Simona de Silvestro and Alexander Rossi each found the sandtrap at Hell Corner.
A steering rack stop left in one car led to an AU$5,000 fine for the Kostecki team, and Jake Kostecki struck the fence at Griffins Bend. On Friday McLaughlin cut the lap record by three-tenths, and Andre Heimgartner posted a Nissan Altima's first lap under 2:04.
Saturday practice was quieter. Will Davison set an early benchmark that stood, and all teams except DJR Team Penske ran both their drivers in the session, Premat being the exception in the number 17 car. The Waters and Caruso entry was plagued by mechanical issues and a stuck throttle.
Who won pole position?
Scott McLaughlin took pole in the Top 10 Shootout, beating Chaz Mostert's benchmark by four-tenths of a second to claim his second Bathurst pole. It was his fifteenth pole of the 2019 championship. Cam Waters had briefly held provisional pole with the session's first sub-2:04 lap.
Qualifying was a forty-minute session held in wet conditions. McLaughlin and Mostert traded the fastest times, Shane van Gisbergen was third and Will Davison fourth, while Whincup rose from 23rd to 7th with a late time.
Behind the leaders, Jack Le Brocq finished the session at the back in the wet, while Brodie Kostecki beat Alexander Rossi to 24th by three hundredths of a second.
Scott McLaughlin led the drivers' championship going into the event. Shane van Gisbergen was second, Chaz Mostert third and Fabian Coulthard fourth, while DJR Team Penske led Triple Eight by 855 points in the teams' standings.
On the first day of practice McLaughlin improved his own Top Ten Shootout mark by a tenth of a second.
How did the race begin?
Brodie Kostecki pulled up on the warm-up lap, describing breathing difficulties, which delayed the start. His cousin Jake then took the wheel. The team later found that his helmet fan had been blowing dry ice from the cool box into his face, causing carbon monoxide poisoning.
Jake Kostecki jumped into the car to restart from the pit lane. McLaughlin got the jump on Mostert into Hell Corner, and Michael Caruso slipped past his Tickford team-mate into second.
Tim Slade hit the outside wall at Quarry Corner, which brought out the safety car early in the race.
What happened under the lap 135 safety car?
A safety car on lap 135 was called for the stricken Commodore of Hinchcliffe and Rossi. Fabian Coulthard, then third, slowed the rest of the field, and the gap between Whincup and him grew from three seconds to over forty seconds.
Initially Coulthard received a drive-through for breaking safety car procedure. Questions were then raised about whether the slowdown had been ordered by the team, and that became the centre of the case.
Shane van Gisbergen called Coulthard a sacrificial lamb, and Erebus boss Barry Ryan said DJR Team Penske had cheated and should lose its points. James Courtney, who finished third with Jack Perkins, defended the team and said that stripping McLaughlin of his win would be harsh.
The incident also brought unpleasant consequences: Coulthard received death threats after it, and McLaughlin lashed out at fans when those threats became public.
What penalties did DJR Team Penske receive?
DJR Team Penske was charged with breaching team orders and fined $250,000, with $100,000 suspended until 31 December 2021. The team also lost 300 points from the teams' championship, which reshaped the standings the race had produced. Coulthard and Tony D'Alberto were relegated to twenty-first after the stewards investigated the team orders.
The hearing was held on 19 October, and the stewards found the team orders were meant to benefit Coulthard and D'Alberto. McLaughlin and Premat kept their first place, because the stewards did not find them responsible for the orders.
On 10 November DJR Team Penske was fined a further $30,000 after McLaughlin's pole time was stripped. Several cylinders had valve lift above the legal limit, and the team put it down to machinery that had been calibrated badly.
The penalty carried over to Race 30 at Sandown, where McLaughlin started last. He kept his Bathurst win because the engine used in qualifying had been replaced before the race.
What did the result mean for the teams?
The Triple Eight pairing of van Gisbergen and Tander was runner-up, while Walkinshaw Andretti United's Courtney and Perkins completed the podium in third. It was the first Bathurst 1000 win for DJR since 1994, and DJR had merged with Team Penske in 2015.
Before the race DJR Team Penske held an 855-point lead over Triple Eight in the teams' championship, a lead the 300-point deduction would later erode.
