Did the 2010s deliver the best Bathurst 1000s ever?

The Bathurst 1000 sets a pretty high benchmark when it comes to drama. Mount Panorama is not the sort of place that throws up dud races all that often.

So, to say that the 2010s provided some of the most epic Bathurst races of all time is not something to be taken lightly.

The decade of Bathursts got off to a decent start. In 2010, Triple Eight took the first 1-2 finish since the Holden Dealer Team's 1984 effort, and a year later Nick Percat became the first rookie to win the Great Race since Jacky Ickx in '77.

The 2013 Bathurst 1000 was a cracker too, boiling down to a final lap scrap between Mark Winterbottom and Jamie Whincup. The pair even ran side-by-side up Mountain Straight on that last tour, with Winterbottom narrowly holding on to take a first B1000 win for the team then known as Ford Performance Racing.

But it was all nothing compared to what 2014 had in store. When a car starts from the back of the grid, only leads one lap all day, and comes away with the win you know something remarkable has happened.

On the Friday evening, Chaz Mostert and Paul Morris were all but out of the running. Having been pinged for passing under red flag conditions in qualifying, Mostert was excluded from the session, relegating the pair to a starting spot at the very back of the grid.

For a long time, the race wasn't going much better. Morris was one of a handful of drivers to be caught out by the track breaking up on the way into Griffin's Bend, with the man known as 'The Dude' burying the #6 FPR Falcon in the fence not long before the race was red-flagged.

Once the track was repaired and the race was restarted, the attrition began.

David Reynolds dropped out with an alternator problem while running second. Scott McLaughlin hit the wall at The Cutting. Shane van Gisbergen, leading handsomely inside the final hour, came in for a final stop only for his car to stall and refuse to fire back up. Craig Lowndes sent Mark Winterbottom into a spin at Hell Corner, picking up a drivethrough for his efforts.

In the end, there were two unlikely sets of contenders: Mostert/Morris and Whincup/Paul Dumbrell.

It felt like there would never be a Bathurst even remotely as dramatic as the 2014 epic, but two years later the Great Race provided again

The latter pair hadn't exactly had a smooth run either, starting from 24th after a qualifying crash, before Whincup copped a drivethrough for a dangerous re-entry at the exit of The Chase around 60 laps into the race.

Still, it was the #1 Commodore that led into the final lap - albeit with a tank critically low on fuel. After Whincup ignored repeated instructions from pitwall to conserve, his Holden spluttered and slowed on Conrod Straight, with the chequered flag almost in sight. Mostert swept past to take the unlikeliest of wins, as Whincup slipped back to fifth after crawling to the line.

"I reckon next year we won't even bother about qualifying,'' Mostert joked. "We will just save our tyres for the race."

In hindsight that would have been a smart move. It was in qualifying 12 months later that Mostert broke his leg in a sickening shunt, which may well have cost him the 2015 Supercars title...

It felt like there would never be a Bathurst even remotely as dramatic as that 2014 epic, but, two years later, the Great Race provided again.

This time it was all about a controversial crash in the closing stages.

Leader McLaughlin was tagged by Whincup coming into The Chase, forcing the Kiwi's Volvo onto the grass. Whincup immediately checked up to redress the failed pass attempt, which baulked an opportunistic Garth Tander, who was trying to snatch the lead from third. At the same time, McLaughlin charged back on track and fired into the side of Tander, sending them both into the wall and out of the race.

Whincup led until the chequered flag, but a 15-second post-race penalty for the initial McLaughlin contact meant Will Davison and Jonathon Webb were declared provisional winners.

Triple Eight appealed against the penalty hoping to have the win restored, but inadvertently did so on grounds that would only ever lead to the penalty being reduced from 15s to 10s. When an application to change the appeal was rejected, Davison and Webb were officially declared the 2016 Bathurst 1000 winners.

The 2017 Bathurst race had Erebus Motorsport, otherwise known as the "team of misfits", announce its arrival on the big stage, as Reynolds and Luke Youlden took victory. They almost made it two-from-two a year later, only for Reynolds to break down with leg cramps in the closing stages, handing victory to Bathurst legends Lowndes and Steve Richards.

The decade then ended with one of the most controversial Bathursts of all time.

The 2019 race itself was decent enough, with McLaughlin taking a maiden Great Race crown for himself and Alex Premat after a tense final-lap showdown with van Gisbergen.

But instead of celebrating a Bathurst 1000 win, McLaughlin's DJR Team Penske squad spent the hours immediately after the race discussing a team orders breach charge with the stewards after a go-slow order had been handed to Fabian Coulthard.

On lap 130, with Whincup and McLaughlin scrapping over the lead, the safety car was called to recover Alexander Rossi, who was stranded in the sand trap at the last corner. Coulthard, running third, had the leaders in his sights as the safety car came out, before dropping way back over the course of the lap and causing a bottleneck of angry drivers behind him.

The 2019 Bathurst 1000 led to DJRTP being accused of "blatant cheating" by a rival team boss

It initially looked like a standard case of trying to avoid the double stack, but that wasn't what had rival teams fuming. Several cars had stopped during the previous safety car, but the two leaders had not. They'd therefore been caught out in a moment of strategic vulnerability, which could have led to them dropping outside the top five, until Coulthard's intervention built a window big enough to negate the advantage held by anyone behind.

The saga was accompanied by a comical radio exchange between Coulthard and his engineer Mark Fenning, who stressed that he didn't know where the incident was and mispronounced the word debris. At the same time, the other side of the same garage was telling McLaughlin to push as hard as he could to the pitlane entry.

The fallout wasn't pretty. Erebus boss Barry Ryan was the most outspoken when he labelled the team's actions "blatant cheating".

The results were left provisional until the following weekend, when a deferred hearing found DJRTP guilty of an Obligation of Fairness breach. The team was slapped with a record $250,000 fine, $100,000 of which was suspended, and stripped of its teams' championship points for the round. But McLaughlin and Premat's win stood.

There was more to come. Four weeks later, on the very day McLaughlin wrapped up the 2019 Supercars title at Sandown, a second Bathurst controversy emerged.

This one stemmed back even further than the first of the year. It technically began on the Saturday evening at Bathurst; fresh from McLaughlin taking a lap record-shattering pole in the top 10 shootout.

DJRTP had requested permission to fit a new engine to the #17 Mustang after spotting some concerning irregularities in the data. The engine was immediately sealed and added to the list of units that would be subjected to post-race checks, a list that would later also include McLaughlin's race-winning engine.

The checks, when completed weeks later, revealed that the race engine was fine, but the qualifying engine exceeded the valve lift tolerances. Cue an even more spectacular fallout, as officials were left with the tricky situation of trying to penalise a car that had qualified with an illegal engine, but won with a legal one.

The outcome was a $30,000 fine, McLaughlin and Premat being stripped of their Bathurst pole, and, curiously, being put to the back of the Sandown grid.