Welp. He’s out again. He will be replaced — at least temporarily — by Barclay Nettlefold, CEO of Racing Australia Consolidated Enterprises (RACE), the group that owns Supercars. I eagerly look forward to hearing more about what’s going on.

This weekend’s Phillip Island SRO opener had all the usual SRO sports car classes driven by a mix of extremely eager aspirants and Supercars drivers, but to me what stole the show was the debut of Mustang Cup Australia (which also featured several Supercars drivers). I challenge anyone to come up with a more dramatic first-ever race of a new championship than this one:

This is Cameron passing Golding for the win, +0.006

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— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Mar27, 2026 at 9:42 PM

Seeing that ending does not spoil it, of course, because it was a coin flip. Watch the whole thing.

The press release announcing this truly is a marvelous thing. It claims the new branding represents the series’ “Grand Prix intensity and global ambition.” I can translate that for you right now: “NASCAR makes people think of America, and (we believe) that dissuades Europeans from buying tickets.” Even better, they frame the decade-old category as the “ultimate stage for professional drivers in European touring car racing.”

Touring car racing?

Oh, I see. This is V8 “touring car” racing. That is, don’t think of NASCAR, the American organization that actually sanctions this. Think of Supercars, the Australian organization that doesn’t sanction this. I wonder how long the NASCAR relationship will carry on?

EuroNASCAR is already rolling out driver news with this catchy “NASCAR Euro Series V8GP” moniker, and I will give them this: If it were called the V8GP European Championship, it would be the thing they think it is. It isn’t, though. It’s the NASCAR European Series.

Anyway, MSR is running all of these cars, and I say hell yeah to that.

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.

For Chevrolet’s part, some saw tapping Team 18 as the new HT as a big risk, even though Anton De Pasquale was consistently in the mix last year. Well, he won race 2, so that seems like it’s working out fine.

The Toyota debut wasn’t perfect — they had one engine go pop — but by the last race, all five Supras had finished in the top 10. Not a bad start.

There were some track surface problems that sort of screwed over the support categories, and several main game drivers got severely overheated in the last race, but nevertheless, Supercars reports record attendance, and it was a great all-around event.

Waters/Mostert/Randle is an unfair Bathurst car

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Feb 13, 2026 at 7:08 PM

Sure enough, they’re on pole, and there are two more AMGs behind them. That car is as much a part of the Mountain as any other at this point.

This was a blindingly fast qualifying session. Expect an amazing race.

Watch on YouTube

Just to be clear, this will make Buckley the fourth woman ever to compete full-time in Super2 and the only woman in Super2 or Supercars at all this year. When (not if) she moves up to the main game, she will become the second-ever woman driving full-time in Supercars (Simona de Silvestro being the first), and the first one native to Australia.

This is also the series where Kalle Rovanperä is beginning his single-seater odyssey, and he did not do so well. I wonder if things are going to pick up for him before the Super Formula season starts.