Tears flow as Kostecki takes shock Bathurst 1000 crown

Joanna Guelas | October 11, 2026

Even Brodie Kostecki admits his shock at claiming a second Bathurst 1000 win, after pulling off a hair-raising finish when race leader Anton De Pasquale ran out of fuel on the final lap.

As De Pasquale desperately tried to keep his car alive, the door opened for Kostecki when defending Supercars champion Chaz Mostert crashed into the wall at Forrest’s Elbow with five laps to go.

Dick Johnson Racing driver Kostecki made the most of the first safety car of the gruelling 161-lap marathon and overtook polesitter Zach Bates en route to De Pasquale, before the Team 18 driver’s last-lap calamity.

Team boss Adrian Burgess later said De Pasquale’s unfortunate ending was due to “an error somewhere in the fuel calculations”. Putting it another way, Burgess bluntly said: “We f***ed up.”

Triple Eight star Will Brown and co-driver Scott Pyne finished second, followed by Matt Stone Racing rookie Bates in third with Aaron Seton.

An emotional Kostecki shed tears as he spoke to long-time co-driver Todd Hazelwood after crossing the finish line.

Tears also flowed in the Team 18 garage, while De Pasquale sat emotionless as he waited for a tow back to pit lane.

“Oh, to be honest I’m still in shock,” Kostecki said.

“I haven’t seen him (De Pasquale) yet, but … ultimately this is how this race goes sometimes. It’s heartbreaking. 

“The mountain really chooses the winner at the end of the day, and we had to claw our way back up to there.”

Kostecki and Hazelwood soared to victory without long-time engineer George Commins, who is recovering at home after a mountain biking accident.

Team manager Tom Moore was standing in for Commins.

“Tom said to me leading into this weekend that this was his best chance that he’s ever had at Bathurst,” Kostecki joked.

Kostecki and Hazelwood – the 2024 Bathurst 1000 champions for Erebus Motorsport – looked a forlorn chance of claiming a second victory  after a disastrous pit stop inside the last 40 laps.

The Dick Johnson Racing crew had struggled to replace the No.17 Ford Mustang’s brakes and Kostecki tumbled from first to fifth.

Three-time series champion Scott McLaughlin was the last to win the 1000km epic for Dick Johnson Racing, doing so in 2019 with Alexandre Premat.

Matt Stone Racing pair Bates and Seton will leave Bathurst after a fairytale weekend.

Widely unknown to those outside Australian motorsport circles before this event, the 22-year-old Bates is now the fastest driver in the Gen3 era.

Bates dedicated his record-breaking provisional-pole lap of 2:03.9376 to his mother Alison Drower, who died from cancer weeks before his Bathurst 1000 debut last year.

The Canberran is also the son of former rally and Supercars driver Rick Bates, and nephew of four-time Australian Rally champion Neal Bates.

“Of course there’s a little part of me that’s gutted,” Bates said.

This weekend was also a family affair for co-driver Seton, who started from the top spot 30 years after his father, two-time Australian Touring Car champion Glenn Seton, claimed pole for the Bathurst 1000.

Unlike the wet weather chaos of the 2025 race, drivers flaunted blistering pace under sunny conditions and reached the halfway mark in less than three hours.

The record before Sunday’s race for the longest a Bathurst 1000 had gone without a safety car was 132 laps, set in 2024 when Kostecki and Hazelwood won in hot and dry conditions.

Defending Bathurst 1000 winner Matt Payne and new co-driver Will Davison finished fifth after serving two penalties.

Series leader Payne was first slapped with a five-second penalty for a tussle with David Reynolds at the top of Conrod Straight, before serving a drive-through penalty when a Grove crew member was found to have mistakenly retrieved a loose rear wheel beyond pit lane limits.

BATHURST 1000 RESULTS:

1. Brodie Kostecki/Todd Hazelwood (No.17 Dick Johnson Racing)

2. Will Brown/Scott Pye (No.888 Triple Eight Race Engineering)

3. Zach Bates/Aaron Seton (No.10 Matt Stone Racing)

4. Jack Le Brocq/Harri Jones (No.4 Matt Stone Racing)

5. Matt Payne/Will Davison (No.19 Grove Racing)