What’s it like to compete in a top-flight endurance race at Bathurst?
- Team players
- Stage fright
- Straight to the pool room
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Competing in a motorsport endurance event at Bathurst is akin to taking a mark at the MCG or hitting a six at the Adelaide Oval; it’s the stuff of absolute childhood fantasy and – for most people – it’s completely out of reach.
But sometimes lightning can strike in just the right spot and dreams can come true, even if racing at Mount Panorama is every bit as daunting as it appears.
As a club-level motorsport participant, me fronting the starting lights at the 2023 Hi-Tec Oils Bathurst 6 Hour over Easter weekend seemed as unlikely as racing for Red Bull.
Everything – budget, the track itself, the right team to go with – seemed just too far out of reach.
The world works in mysterious ways, though. A chance conversation with a couple of racing mates ignited a small flicker of a chance to contest the 2023 event – if I could find the budget.
Motor racing always comes down to money; if you have it, you can race. If you have a bit more, you can race at a bigger event, or you can race at a few smaller ones. I chose to put my eggs in the Bathurst basket.
And talking money, there’s a fair degree of risk in racing someone else’s car, too.
Owner Andrew ‘Macka’ McMaster was pretty sanguine about me joining he and our mutual mate Dave Worrell for the six-hour enduro, but if I hung it upside down off a fence on lap one of practice (that happened to another team, as it turned out), there would be a bill to settle.
The logistics, too, are considerable. Eleven people need to be fed, watered and accommodated for five nights, a race car (plus a complete spare donor car) needs to be trailered up, the race car itself needs to be extensively prepped, a gravity-fed fuel rig built and tested, and more besides – all between the day-to-day of full-time jobs and families.
Team players
The Mad Macks Racing team is to F1 what Southpark is to Disney – loud, irreverent and absolutely in it for the hilarity.
But a good result, at the most hallowed of circuits, means everything to a group of people who have given up incalculable personal time, considerable amounts of money and of tonne of emotional energy to get us to 6:00pm on Sunday night at Mount Panorama.
A trio of podiums at the Bathurst 6 Hour – including two victories – preceded the team’s 2023 effort, which saw this intrepid band of greasy-handed wanderers step up to a faster, yet slightly unknown BMW 125i package. Which was crashed about four weeks before the Easter weekend…
“Yeah, that wasn’t great,” grimaces Macka.
While the damage was largely superficial, it took time away from preparation… and preparation is everything in endurance racing.
Sunday working bees, long evenings across various workshops and a hurried final shakedown at a streaming Sydney Motorsport Park two days before the team left for The Mountain would have to do.
Stage fright
I still get butterflies driving into a circuit, 25 years after I did my first track day. This time, I got them at Katoomba, two hours out from Bathurst.
It’s impossible to describe how emotional it feels to drive down Panorama Avenue, knowing that you’re not just showing up to work at the event or to spectate. My name over Garage 10 just reinforces the surreal feeling.
That feeling evaporates about 25 seconds into my first lap in Friday afternoon practice. Oh. My. God. Our car is a mid- to rear-of-pack racer in this mixed grid of 60 cars, and speeds between the front and back of the field vary by 60km/h at their fastest.
Someone likened the experience of being rounded up by the likes of Bathurst 1000-winner Will Davison, NASCAR winner Marcos Ambrose and a myriad of other legends of the sport to racing through the Death Star trench, and it’s a good analogy.
It’s like no other driving experience I’ve ever come across. My eyes are on stalks as I try and learn a new (and fearsome) track, a new (and trickily hard) tyre and the little BMW itself, all while managing cars that are desperate to get past.
In fact, it was so full-on, I wasn’t that sure I wanted to go back out on Saturday morning…
“That’s normal; this is a place you walk up on,” texts Supercars ace Warren Luff. “It’s one of those places where, with more laps, you’ll naturally find speed without feeling like you’re going much faster.”
Straight to the pool room
And so it turns out; my times on Saturday tumble by a full 10 seconds a lap, putting me in the frame with Dave lapspeed-wise and giving us a genuine shot at a decent result.
My race is one to remember; thrown into the car for the second stint with a full tank of fuel, the aim is to race cleanly and quickly for about an hour and a half.
I manage to drag that out to two hours and 10 minutes thanks to some safety car laps – and it’s two hours and 10 minutes that I’m never likely to experience again.
Plunging over Skyline with another car up my clacker, storm clouds banking menacingly to the west and the world’s greatest racetrack at my disposal… this really feels like the pinnacle of everything I’ve ever done in the automotive game.
From those first scary laps at Oran Park in 1998 to these (just as scary) laps at Mount Panorama, I’m not sure I’ll ever top this.
Our reward is 23rd place after starting 58th and we nab third place in our class before officialdom steps in post-race. It means we miss out on standing on the podium but, honestly, it doesn’t matter.
Surviving this fearsome baptism of fire without putting a mark on the car – and being in the garage as this team of true race fans helps Macka drive the wheels off in the final stint to hunt down that third place – is reward enough.
But I’ll make a spot in the pool room for the trophy when it arrives…
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Keyword: Field of dreams: Racing an enduro at Mount Panorama