Why Bathurst 1000 has lost its international flavour

Bathurst remains, for many, one of the truly great races, but in recent years the 1000km touring car classic around the mountain has become more of a national affair, even if global motorsport has become a more open playing field.

When touring cars were at their strongest in the late stages of the last century, the crossover of Group A saw drivers move between Europe and Australia. However, the two breakaway Super Touring Bathursts of 1997 and 1998, fabled to British Touring Car followers as the time their teams and drivers conquered the mountain, are almost eradicated from the history of Supercars, with current drivers barely aware there were once two ‘Bathurst 1000s’.

Jim Richards and Rickard Rydell won the last of those events in a Tom Walkinshaw Racing-run Volvo S40, the year the Swede also won the BTCC. Since then, only one international driver has won: Alexandre Premat, who had acclimatised to the series as a full-time Supercars driver before becoming a top-level co-driver. Only two drivers from outside the Australasian region have taken part since that win: France’s Kevin Estre, and Switzerland’s Simona de Silvestro, both 2023.

So why the continual downturn in international stars, when drivers such as Matt Neal, John Cleland, Jason Plato, and Yvan Muller were regular guests in the early years of the Supercars era?

One of the biggest challenges is adapting to a unique car with its own isolated technical regulation. The Australian championship replaced Group A with its own Group 3A five-litre V8 cars in 1993, which later took on the ‘Supercars’ name. These rear-wheel-drive beasts differed greatly from Europe’s move to two-litre Super Touring. Iterations of that concept continue with the current Gen3 Ford Mustangs, Chevrolet Camaros and Toyota Supras, which look closer to GT cars but have much more in common with their Holden Commodore and Ford Falcon predecessors, making adapting hard, even for GT drivers.

“We’ve had a lot of international drivers come and drive our cars, but they’re very difficult as they’re right-hand drive, and they’re still a stick-shift though they’re now sequential,” says seven-time Bathurst champion Craig Lowndes.

Estre was the last high-profile international driver at the Bathurst 1000 in 2023

Photo by: Edge Photographics

“We’ve had Andy Priaulx come over and drive our sister car,” he adds, referring to Priaulx and Mattias Ekstrom’s wild card entry with Triple Eight in 2013. “Andy had been out here a number of times, and in the end he got his head around it; they’re a unique car with front-engine, rear-wheel drive and a locked diff, so they’re different to anything else out there.”

Lowndes’s former team principal Roland Dane, now running PremiAir Racing, agrees that Supercars’ basic differential is a key factor: “We run a constantly locked diff, and if we removed that and had a proper differential like a GT3 car or a NASCAR, I think that would improve the racing. It would make the cars easier to set up for the average driver. Then we’d see an influx of international drivers, because a lot of them know the circuit very well through the Bathurst 12 Hour and can be highly competitive.

“The issue is you’ve got a handful of drivers at the top of this category who I’d label as ‘turkeys who don’t vote for Christmas’. They want to keep it as a closed shop.”

"I loved the international flavour and what they could bring, their culture, our culture, their fans, our fans" David Reynolds

There are long-standing political factors, too. In 2010 the series stopped teams running their two full-time drivers in the same car, a rule that still stands. Dane argues it was meant to stop Triple Eight dominating at the mountain, though it backfired when the team went 1-2 that year with Lowndes leading Whincup. He believes the rule stops teams being experimental with their second car.

“The teams just got ultra-conservative about who they put in the cars, so these days you rarely see an international,” says Dane. “You can take a driver to a track like Sandown, with lots of 90-degree corners and relatively low speed, and they can learn it in five minutes, as Estre showed, but go to Bathurst… it’s completely different.”

Then there is the waning interest in European racing. “Our younger drivers don’t have the same kind of knowledge of these other series,” says Lowndes. “We’ve got the Scotty McLaughlins and Shane van Gisbergens who have come from our world and gone to America – and the focus may have changed from Europe to America.”

Reynolds, who co-drove with Priaulx in 2009 and 2010, says he missed the international flavour

Photo by: Chris Von Wieldt

Lowndes adds: “I think the desire is still there to get British drivers here. I met Jake Hill last year at the Adelaide Motorsport Festival, he loves our style of car and he’s the right kind of person to get over here and get into a test.”

“I would have loved to have tried Ash Sutton or Gordon Shedden,” continues Dane, “but when you’re looking at the pool of drivers available, I’d be looking at the top-ranking professional GT3 drivers, as there are some very good drivers who didn’t quite make it in single-seaters and have huge potential.”

The change in appetite isn’t one-way, as even younger touring car drivers in Europe lack the same appreciation of the Great Race as previous generations.

Yet Supercars drivers still feel the loss. “I 100% miss it,’ says 2017 Bathurst winner David Reynolds. “I loved the international flavour and what they could bring, their culture, our culture, their fans, our fans. I thoroughly loved it.”