This weekend: Bathurst 12 hour!

Time for one of my favorite races of the year. No night practice or lights, but the first lap is in the dark. Piles of different manufacturers. A track that is ridiculous. Kangaroos. A close finish every time. I don't think we'll have Frosty Winterbottom racing this year, though.

Bathurst 12 hour! Starts at 11:45 AM Mountain Time on Saturday if I'm doing my math right. That's what, 1:45 PM Eastern or 10:45 AM Pacific?

You can watch it free via the magic of the internets: https://www.bathurst12hour.com.au/streams-tv/international-streaming/

They already had 4 roos red flag practice for 5 minutes or so. 

Man they bent a lot of hardware in qualifying. 

They're already trading paint for the lead, 22 minutes in. 

Toyman01 said:

Man they bent a lot of hardware in qualifying. 

I was there on Friday, and they were bending a lot even during practice. And hot, wow! 

I turned the race on ten minutes into it and I've had it on all day. It's been a great race to watch, but I'm fighting hard to stay awake during this last half hour.

I'm just filled with stress, hoping no bad luck befalls the cars I like.

Great finish for Bentley! I can't believe the rain held off. 

Yeah! I can't believe how lucky they were when that puncture happened, because that could have been game over. Instead, they managed to keep the lead! They were up front all race and really deserved the win, so that was cool to see.

Man, if that rain had shown up just 20 minutes earlier...

It seems they got all of the crashing out of their system during qualifying since there were incredibly long green-flag stints during the race.  It really was tense wondering if the rain was going to affect the race.  I never heard what happened to the #8 Bentley. Did it spin because of the flat tire or did something in the drivetrain break causing the spin and the flat was a secondary casualty? If a car goes back to the pits via the flatbed, is it not allowed to be fixed and return to the track?

I managed to stay up to watch the whole thing, although I'm paying for it today.  Fortunately, not much going on until the final stage of the Vuelta a San Juan down in Argentina. Then there's some sport ball event everyone is talking about. 

At Le Mans, if you can't get back to the pits without assistance, you're done. There may be a similar rule here. 

That was a great race. Got to watch the first 40 minutes and the last 2 hours. I love that they start it in the dark as well. It's a bucket list item for me to go to Mt. Panorama for either a V8 Supercars race or the 12h race. Cool to see the Big Boi Bentley take home the win!

So Bentley... yeah. While most of the cars in the race look a fair bit (or even a lot) like the road-going versions, the Bentley looks nothing like anything they make (engine at the other end, and so on). So I guess they're playing on customers' vanity that "why yes, the maker of my car did win this race," as if that somehow implies how smart their choice is.

Ferrari makes tractors, so is the thinking that farmers buy tractors on Monday based upon Ferrari winning F1 on Sunday? Oy.

Ford, Lamborghini and Porsche all have tractors in their history, but I think the Ferrari tractors are completely unrelated.

In reply to kb58 :

Not sure what you mean by "engine at the other end"...I'm fairly sure it's still front-engine. It may be set back a bit more than the road car, I don't know. And sure, it has very little to do with the road car at this point...most of the GT3 cars are trending that way. I think they need to pull it back, or just replace the category in a few years with something new. (GT4 cars have wings now, maybe they'll get fast enough to be the top GT category.)

Did anyone think there were way too many punctures?  I know temps were really high, maybe that was a contributing factor, or did Pirelli screw up?  Even the winning car had a puncture in the last stint, luckily it was near the end of the  Conrod Straight, so not too far to get back to the pits.  Others had to do almost an entire lap.

THere's a really nice 30ish min highlights package on YouTube BTW

Adrian_Thompson said:

Did anyone think there were way too many punctures?  I know temps were really high, maybe that was a contributing factor, or did Pirelli screw up?  Even the winning car had a puncture in the last stint, luckily it was near the end of the  Conrod Straight, so not too far to get back to the pits.  Others had to do almost an entire lap.

I don't think so.  It looked there was a lot of debris on the track. Going off line to get around lapped traffic was a dice roll. 

In reply to Ian F :

Yeah, the intense winds swirling around the area may have been what put so much debris on the track.

I watched for a bit on motor trend on demand, and the main thing I have to say is that it is a great sounding race.  They did a great job getting the engine noises piped through.

Fair point about engine placement, I don't know for a fact that it's mid-engine.

About tire punctures, yeah, an awful lot of them seemed to be left rear, way more than random. Wonder if there was something sharp embedded somewhere that they were hitting.

BTW, there's now a ~30-minute summary/highlights video that'll save you, oh, 11.5 hours.