Thanks to a near total lack of Safety Cars, with the only appearance coming on Lap 132, making this the first Bathurst since 1991 to get through the opening 100 laps without a Safety Car, Todd Hazelwood and Brodie Kostecki have gone into the history books…

THE FIRST BATHURST WINNERS, BE IT OVER 500 MILES OR 1000 KILOMETRES, TO BREAK UNDER THE MAGICAL 6-HOUR MARK.

A race-winning time of 5 hours, 58 minutes 3.0649 seconds, an average speed of 167.4km/h, surpassing the old record from 2018 when Craig Lowndes and Steven Richards won in a time of 6 hours, 1 minute and 44.8637 seconds, a race that had 2 Safety Cars.

Every single car down to 18th finished in under 6 hours, appropriately the car in 18th was the No.18 of Mark Winterbottom and Michael Caruso, who had a race time of 5h 59m 59.7057s, getting in by the blink of an eye.

Prior to 2024, when the race was run over 500 miles on the old pre-1987 track (Prior to the addition of The Chase), Peter Brock’s maiden win in the Bathurst 500 of 1972 (Contested over 130 laps) was won in a time of 6 hours and 59.1 seconds, which was the last running of the race prior to becoming a 1000 kilometre race with the conversion to metric.

Today’s race also had 25 out of 26 cars as classified finishers (96.2%), the greatest percentage of cars to finish in the race’s history, the only exception being the crash for the Penrite Mustang of Matt Payne and Garth Tander that caused the Safety Car, which means there has still never been a Bathurst 1000 without a DNF…

Still, if finishing the race in under 6 hours was once considered impossible, then one day we can definitely get through a Bathurst without a retirement.