Ferrari wins Bathurst 12 Hour

The Finn was making his Bathurst debut barely a week after driving a similar machine for Risi Competizione at the Daytona 24 Hours race in the US. Vilander did a 2m 2.0861s lap to take pole from the #90 MARC Cars BMW M6 GT3 driven by Chaz Mostert/Max Twigg/Morgan Haber. The similar #60 machine of Steve Richards/Mark Winterbottom/Marco Wittmann and the #35 Aston Martin V12 Vantage of Miedecke/Walsh/Bates qualified on the second row. The Longhurst/Skaife/Ingall/Glock BMW M6 GT3 qualified in eighth place, but the fancied Mercedes-AMG GT3 entries of Craig Baird/Maro Engel/Shane van Gisbergen (#83) and Pedro Lamy/Mathias Lauda/Bernd Schneider (#22) didn’t even make the top ten shootout, qualifying 17th and 21st, respectively. The early hours of the race had their incidents, but the Ferrari and Merc-AMG squads managed to avoid the worst of them, the Ferrari holding a margin over the #22 AMG in the early hours, before van Gisbergen took the lead in the #83 car at the halfway point.  In the event’s closing hours, the Maranello Motorsport campaign threatened to unravel when Baird tapped Lowndes on a restart and sent him into the sand at Murray’s Corner. Lowndes was just able to be recovered without being lapped, leaving Whincup to make up the deficit in the final stint.  

The Ferrari had the edge on the AMG GT3s in the straights, which Whincup demonstrated when he passed van Gisbergen – half on the dirt – down Conrod Straight to take the lead with 40 minutes to go. In his efforts to catch the Ferrari, van Gisbergen first tapped a lapped car, then put his AMG hard into the wall at The Dipper and was out of the race with less than 20 minutes remaining.  The final margin of one lap over the Calvert-Jones/Long/Lieb/Campbell Porsche 911 GT3 R (with the Kane/Smith/Jarvis Bentley Continental GT3 in third), made the win look easier than it actually was, but it certainly could have finished differently. Whincup’s first ever victory in GT competition, this year’s Bathurst 12 Hour win was Lowndes’ second, following the 2014 victory in a Ferrari 458 GT3 he shared with Mika Salo, John Bowe and Peter Edwards.