Brodie Kostecki comes out of Melbourne Supercars round in towering form

Supercars just wrapped up its highest profile weekend of the year as the show-stealing support act at the Melbourne Grand Prix. It’s not necessary in this venue to sum up all four races and their qualifying sessions, but I will offer some takeaways.

The new Toyota is really almost there. The Walkinshaw Supras qualified near the front at times and bagged multiple top-10 results, including the Supra’s first podium from Ryan Wood.

The Penrite cars are well in it. Payne was a huge factor in the first two races, and Allen had to keep going to the back and driving back through. He surely passed the majority of the cars passed in the entire race meeting.

Brodie Kostecki won pole on Thursday and converted it into a win, breaking a six-year streak of Ford failing to win in Melbourne, and he did it with food poisoning. He only got more fearsome as he felt better, winning three of the four races and becoming the second driver ever to win the Larry Perkins Trophy twice.

Broc Feeney did win race 3, meaning Kostecki is only one win ahead of him on the year so far, and Will Brown finally poled one after flailing in qualifying for so long, but overall I come away from Melbourne concerned about Triple Eight’s form. Brown made a lot of bad moves in races and got decisively trounced by Brodie in the last one. Feeney ended up in a lap 1 wreck in the final race and for some reason kept his foot in, dragging his car around destroying everybody else around him before retiring. I sense frustration in the team.

I am certainly not concerned about the form of Supercars as a whole. They smashed long-standing attendance records on days when Formula 1 wasn’t even happening, and the overall weekend attendance was record-breaking also. I think Supercars is getting its moment of recognition on the global motorsports stage. SVG winning a bunch of NASCAR races probably helped, but the exciting Finals last year seemed to make an impact all on its own, and the series is taking advantage of the momentum.