We’re at the halfway mark of the 2022 Supercars season and things suddenly just got interesting.
As if energised by the tropical climes of sunny Darwin after a comparatively frigid weekend in Winton, the series delivered its most unpredictable weekend of the year and opened the door just a smidgen for a driver to think about tackling Shane van Gisbergen and his previously impervious title defence.
There might be life in this season yet.
But before we go on, a disclaimer: Shane van Gisbergen is still 214 points up the road from the next-best driver, and with eight laps to go in the last race the Kiwi was on track to finish at least equal second for the weekend overall. Had it not been for a moment of excess ambition, the story of the Darwin Triple Crown would’ve been far less remarkable.
But that was the story, and when the sport reconvenes in Townsville next month there’ll be a spring in the step of SVG’s myriad would-be challengers and just a subtle ratcheting up of pressure on the reigning champion to respond.
LOSER: SHANE VAN GISBERGEN
So let’s get the weekend’s biggest chapter out of the way: the sudden implosion of Shane van Gisbergen’s race 18 result.
The weekend up until lap 31 had been solid in unspectacular for the championship leader, returning a pair of third places off the back some shrewd strategy work to elevate him from a pair of fourth-place grid spots.
It seemed like history was set to repeat for the weekend’s final race, with Van Gisbergen again running what seemed sure to be third assuming he and the DJR drivers ahead of him reeled in Chaz Mostert, whose very early stop had left him out on ageing tyres.
But the opportunity to make up more ground at the safety car restart, called for Garry Jacobson and Zak Best’s smash, was too good for even the new and improved points-playing Van Gisbergen to pass up.
To be fair, it looked like a trademark elbows-out move for the Gis, tucking in under Davison at the first turn, but he carried too much speed. Not only did he run the DJR very, very wide and lose a pair of places in the process, but in the biff with Will he broke his power steering.
He dropped way down the order with damage and was penalised 15 seconds for the botched pass for good measure, leaving him 21st in the classification, his worst of the season. It’s also the first race weekend this year he hasn’t walked away from with at least one race victory, and it’s only the third overall weekend defeat of his season.
There’s no question the race for victory was clearly on thanks to the safety car restart — and more on the tyre-related reasons for that frustration later on — and that seems to have triggered a conflict between the old win-or-bin Shane and the new play-for-points edition of the Kiwi. The latter has been prevalent until now, but the former won that internal battle this weekend, and it bit him hard.
As already noted, it was far from a disaster in the grand scheme of things. His championship advantage has shrunk from 281 points to 214 — still two clear SuperSprint race wins.
But it gives everyone just a sniff that the reigning champion isn’t infallible. Sometimes that’s all it takes.
WINNER: THE CHAMPIONSHIP (JUST)
The Darwin Triple Crown, coming at around halfway through the season, was billed a pivotal weekend for the state of the championship. Van Gisbergen’s challengers have done generally limited damage to him so far, and another overall victory would almost certainly have put him one clear weekend clear of the field — a body blow to morale and confirmation of the way things looked like they were going.
But not only did Van Gisbergen leave with a diminished lead, but every one of his key rivals had strong weekends.
Anton de Pasquale at long last got a win, Will Davison had a very solid weekend, Cameron Waters took his third win of the year and Chaz Mostert returned to the top step.
All three winners were on the weekend’s final podium too.
You could argue, however, that if Van Gisbergen is to be given a run for his money, splitting the podium places four ways is the least efficient way to do it, and it’s arguably too late for so many title rivals to be squabbling among themselves for the right to take on the champion in the second half of the year.
It’s what’s saved SVG from losing more ground this week, and it might be what gets him over the line if all four challengers continue trading wins after giving him such a head start.
WINNER: CHAZ MOSTERT
Chaz Mostert ended his weekend on a high with a much-needed strong result after a topsy-turvy year for WAU.
And not only that, but he did it with the drive of the weekend, fending off three fresher-shod drivers in an eight-lap post-safety car shootout in which he was given virtually no chance of holding on.
Even his engineer, Adam DeBorre, didn’t think he was going to make it.
“He threw me under the bus under safety car, he didn’t believe in me!” Mostert joked. “He kept saying, ‘You know, the next car on the same tyres is about seven back’, so he was expecting me to lose six positions.
“I love trying to prove him wrong. I don’t know how we hung on.”
Mark Skaife described it as “one of the best drives of his career”.
Ironically the safety car that put him in so much danger might have saved him top spot by giving his tyres a chance to cool, reducing the pressure and giving them the extra kick needed to make it to the end.
That this was his fourth win of the year — the most after Van Gisbergen — but that he still sits sixth and 474 points off the championship lead speaks to the inconsistency of the WAU team, but the strength of that last race will give the team yet more vital clues to unlocking that pace more consistently.
But of course the weekend could’ve been better for WAU. Mostert was disqualified from fourth on Saturday for having his car incidentally but illegally cooled with an air blower while on the grid after he reported an issue on the reconnaissance lap.
The team said it intended to appeal, but it then missed the deadline to lodge its protest, so the result still stands.
The lost 80 points meant Mostert was the only driver among the frontrunners to lose ground to Van Gisbergen on the championship table.
WINNER: ANTON DE PASQUALE
A literal and figurative winner, De Pasquale, anointed as the most likely challenger to the reigning champion ahead of the season, finally chalked up a victory for himself after six podiums and holding second in the standings for much of the season.
He was painfully close to pinching victory from Mostert on Sunday evening too, but he let the eventual winner off the hook with tyre trouble and a mistake on the final lap — though his kerb-hopping moment was probably more a sign of overexertion in the face of a steadfast defence rather than an outright mistake.
It was crucial not only to his title campaign but also to the team, having been disastrously and somewhat mystifyingly off the pace in Winton. Really his Benalla round and a pair of difficult results at the Australian Grand Prix are the only things suppressing his points tally, so a rapid return to form — and getting the monkey off his back — is heartening for those hoping for his title challenge to finally ignite.
LOSER: TYRE TWEAKS
The undercurrent of the weekend was the changes to the tyres rules made as the sport arrived in Darwin designed to guarantee a minimum pressure in the supersoft tyre.
The regular minimum pressure of 17 psi was heightened to 20 psi after some potentially concerning structural problems were identified after Winton and in anticipation of the warm Northern Territory weather, while changes to the way teams are allowed to prepare the tyres — namely banning them from leaving in the sun — were designed to prevent circumvention of the pressure rules.
Drivers were as critical as they generally allow themselves to be when it comes to a control parts supplier like Dunlop, perhaps particularly because the supersoft tyre has proved a stable race compound up until now.
But it hasn’t been providing the level of degradation Dunlop or the sport expected when it was introduced at the start of the season, with the teams mastering the tweaked compound pretty quickly such that it’s being treated pretty much like any other tyre.
Raising the tyre pressures ensured a certain level of degradation, but it did so in a way that several drivers say detracted from the racing.
Tyre temperature and therefore pressure rises when one car follows another. As pressure rises, the contact patch shrinks, raising pressures further in a feedback loop. The hotter the tyres gets, the more it degrades.
Raising the starting pressure speeds up that process significantly.
Notable was that Dave Reynolds’s tyre gamble on Sunday’s first race, changing four tyres late to cut through the field, didn’t pay off nearly as dramatically as was expected. The Grove races said he “just didn’t get the gain that we thought we would have got”.
Shane van Gisbergen was more direct.
“With these silly tyre pressures, you can’t pass,” he told the Cool Down Lap podcast, having earlier in the weekend said, “I’ll get in trouble if I say my feelings”.
The weekend was hardly devoid of action, and you could argue that the thrilling late-race showdown on Sunday evening was a major win for rules that probably prevented De Pasquale from wielding the maximum pace from his tyres, but the drivers are ultimately the ones putting on the show, and it’ll be interesting to see how much weight the criticism carries for future rounds.
