With 37 laps to go, Brodie Kostecki led last weekend’s Bathurst 1000 by 20 seconds. Then his crew tried to change the front brakes, and a bolt refused to budge.

Thirty seconds gone. Fifth place. All over.

"The Mountain always chooses the winner," Kostecki said afterwards. On Sunday, after 161 laps and one of the strangest finishes the Great Race has produced, it chose the historic No. 17 Ford Mustang.

The man who waited

Dick Johnson has won this race before. Five times now, as a team, but not since 2019.

"That's amazing," he said, voice going. "I tell you what, I want a couple more before I fall off the perch." Tears were in his eyes.

Johnson is 81.

The week before the race

The brake stop was not the first thing to go wrong, or even the fifth.

"The mountain tested us with the rebuild of car No. 38 for Rylan Gray and Tony D'Alberto into the early hours of Saturday morning, combined with the loss of our head race engineer through a mountain bike accident prior to the event," team principal Mark Fenning said.

So Kostecki won Bathurst with team manager Tom Moore on the radio, standing in as race engineer at a few days' notice, while the rest of the crew ran on whatever sleep was left after rebuilding a car overnight.

"Bathurst holds a special place in our sport and as a team we are immensely proud to have written another chapter in its rich history," Fenning said.

The last five laps

For 155 laps there was no safety car. None. A 1,000-kilometre endurance race run flat out like a sprint, which is why so many teams finished the weekend talking about pace rather than strategy.

Then, with five laps left, a crash at Forrest's Elbow brought out the only caution of the day and bunched the field for a three-lap run to the flag (but not before a Ford Ranger pulled the destroyed race car behind the concrete barriers).

Kostecki had fresh tyres and nothing to lose. He took second with two laps remaining and set off after the leader, who had taken a short fuel fill to hold position and was nursing the car home, two-plus seconds further down the road.

On the last lap, climbing Mountain Straight, the leading car ran dry.

"The car was just a jet the whole race," Kostecki said.

It was his second Bathurst win with Todd Hazelwood, and between them they led a race-high 77 laps. Will Brown and Scott Pye finished second, 1.184 seconds behind, completing a Mustang one-two and sealing the Enduro Cup on combined results from Bathurst and The Bend. Matt Payne and Will Davison were fifth, James Golding and Richie Stanaway eighth, and Thomas Randle ninth with rookie co-driver Reuben Goodall.

At 5 hours, 54 minutes and 4.749 seconds, it was the fastest Bathurst 1000 ever run.

What Sunday set up

Six Mustang drivers are through to The Finals: Payne, Broc Feeney, Brown, Kostecki, Kai Allen and Cam Waters.

Payne leads on 2,490 points. Feeney has 2,285, Kostecki 2,271. Three rounds left and barely 200 points covering the top three.

But the slate is wiped clean (save for the 25 bonus points for Feeney and Brown after their respective Sprint Cup and Enduro Cup victories) as the cars head to the streets of the Gold Coast, Oct. 23–25. The field of 10 finalists is culled to seven for Sandown, and then just four head to the Adelaide Grand Final with a chance of claiming the drivers' championship title.

Johnson wants another Bathurst win. For that, he’ll have to wait until next year. For everyone else, the next race is less than 10 days away.