McLaughlin reaches Supercars milestone

After winning both the V8 Super Tourer championship in his native New Zealand and the Dunlop V8 Supercar Series feeder category here in Australia in 2012, McLaughlin joined Supercars full time in 2013.

In his first season in the category, McLaughlin drove a VE Commodore for Garry Rogers Motorsport and achieved his first two race wins. When GRM switched to the Volvo S60 for 2014, McLaughlin added six more wins in three seasons before signing with DJR Team Penske (branded as Shell V-Power Racing Team) for 2017.

Eight race wins in the DJR Team Penske FG X Falcon that year brought McLaughlin within a hair of winning the championship. The Kiwi was leading coming into the final round and only lost the championship due to a penalty in the last race.

In 2018, nine more race wins and twelve other podiums saw McLaughlin achieve his first Supercars Championship, finishing 71 points ahead of Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Shane van Gisbergen.

The Kiwi defended his championship in 2019, with his 18 race wins eclipsing the single-season win record formerly held by Craig Lowndes.

In this year’s COVID-impacted season, McLaughlin’s first win came at the Adelaide 500, followed by further wins at the Sydney SuperSprint in July.

En route to his 50th race win, at the Darwin SuperSprint on 22-23 August, McLaughlin surpassed Peter Brock on the all-time Supercars winners list with his 49th win in the first of the round’s three races at Hidden Valley. McLaughlin’s milestone 50th win came in Race 2 and was part of a clean sweep of victories for the 27-year-old in the second leg of the Darwin SuperSprint double header.  

At time of writing, McLaughlin was sitting in fifth place on the all-time Supercars winners list with 52 race wins and should pass Garth Tander (55 wins) before the season’s out, but has a long way to go to eclipse Mark Skaife (90 wins), Craig Lowndes (109 wins) and seven-time Supercars champion Jamie Whincup (122 wins).