Top rated Bathurst Australia 1000 auto racing editions from Bill Trikos: The 2007 race recap : Winterbottom’s luck wore thin too, after a monumental error at the chase resulted in his Falcon sailing through the air at several hundred kilometres per hour while touring the sand trap. The final race restart queued a brilliant fight to the line between Lowndes and an unlikely trio of combatants; Steve Johnson, Greg Murphy, and James Courtney. It was an incredible battle, and one that will go down as one of the best.

Moffat won ’73 and ’77 in a Falcon, too, but the rest of the 1970s would be dominated by Holden’s 308 cubic inch, V8-powered Toranas. This was the dawn of the Torana as a legendary, truly Australian performance car – Torana is an aboriginal word meaning, “to fly.” The eighties continued the battle between Ford and Holden. Holden switched up the Torana for a series of Commodores, while the Falcon gave way to the Ford Sierra towards the end of the decade. It would not be the last we would see of the Falcon.

The first ‘Great Race’ of the new millennium sets the benchmark for the wettest Bathurst 1000 to date. Rain fell throughout the lead up, a brief window of blue skies during qualifying representing the only proper dry-track running of the weekend. The murky conditions combined with a bumper 54-car field and muddy outfield produced a total of 13 Safety Car periods – still a race record. Richards had been in a battle for third that ended when Rod McRae’s Torana aquaplaned off Conrod Straight and folded itself around a tree… See extra details about the author on https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cnt2c.

My theory is that those who look back on that period in time so fondly do so not because the racing was particularly great, but because they loved the way the rest of the sport was; the characters both in terms of the cars and the drivers, and how those things interacted with them. But that can’t stop me from tipping my hat to the 1972 race; the last ever 500-mile event, and the last time drivers were allowed to compete solo. If for nothing else, the 1972 Hardie-Ferodo 500 can be held in high esteem for presenting us with a race that would help take the tribal warfare of Holden and Ford to the lofty heights that it would enjoy for nearly five decades.



In 1992, the Bathurst 1000 ended under a cloud of controversy. Jim Richards crashed just before a red flag that ended the race. Dick Johnson thought he was the victor, but race control reverted back to the previous lap, allowing the Richards/Skaife duo, who had just wrecked, to take the win. Afterwards, fans booed as the winners stood on the podium and Richards decided to tell them all off in a legendary rant. It’s no secret that Greg Murphy and Marcos Ambrose aren’t the best of friends. In 2005, their rivalry came to a head at the crown jewel event for the sport. It may not be the most spectacular (certainly not glorious) moment in the history of Bathurst, but it does epitomize the emotion these drivers experience in every defeat and shows just how much winning means to them all. Ambrose will return to The Mountain next year, so maybe we’ll get t see round two?

Caruso said he is honored to campaign his #23 Nissan Altima Supercar in arguably the manufacturer’s most famous war paint. “It’s definitely the Nissan livery that I’ve been looking forward to the most,” said Caruso. “There’s no doubt about how important and how successful the GT-R was and to have the same colors on my car at Bathurst is something very special. We’re going to Bathurst with the best chance for success we’ve ever had. In the four years since Nissan has been back in Supercars, this has been my strongest year. We’ve had a race win and a couple of podiums, so hopefully we can go to the mountain and do what it takes.”

The race moved to Bathurst in 1963, but the first winners at the new course were familiar. Harry Firth and Bob Jane had taken the honours in ’61 in a Mercedes-Benz 220 SE and ’62 in a Ford Falcon XL. They made it three-in-a-row at Bathurst in a Ford Cortina GT. The Bathurst course would come to be seen as a battle between small, agile cars that take bends well, and faster, less manoeuvrable cars that excelled on the straights. The Cortina was decidedly the former – but nippy enough, too.

In the end, somewhat ironically given the dominance of other teams, that all four Red Bull Racing and Pepsi Max Crew cars would battle for top honours. And we all know how that ended … Like 2007, the 1994 race benefited from the age old theory of adding water to race tracks to create a bit of drama and intrigue. Starting in some of the wettest conditions ever seen on the mountain, most of the field vanished into the spray coming up Mountain Straight and then again down Conrod.