The best ever Bathurst bash!

Was this Bathurst something special or what? Qualifying was one of the greatest sessions V8X has ever witnessed. Greg Murphy's shootout lap was one of the two most amazing things we have ever seen at Mt Panorama, and the race was just a cracker from the first corner to the last. And thankfully the race was played out at one point without a Safety Car for 70 laps.

The first 80 though saw so many Safety Cars you could have been excused for thinking the Audi was actually in the race. Through it all, we saw the leading teams in the country playing games with each other and hunting for a trump card. HRT and SBR opted to split its cars when a lap 12 Safety Car gave them opportunity. Murphy said his team was tempted to stop too, but with the second car already out they could just stuck to what they had planned.

Mark Skaife was at first lucky and then unlucky. After touching Jason Bargwanna early and stopping to repair the crash damage, he was lucky a Safety Car saved him from dropping a lap. The unlucky act was left in the hands of the race stewards, but you can read about that elsewhere.

Marcos Ambrose must have thought it was all going along nicely until he started cutting tyres - two in fact, and SBR had no idea why.

Once the strategies had played out, a Safety Car around 10 laps from home compressed the lead group and gave us a great sprint to the flag. Murphy had the speed to dominate that sprint and win; Lowndes could do nothing about him and in fact was more concerned with Steve Ellery, who was on his tail. Ellery had the Richards father and son combination to deal with, and fortunately for him they played hard with each other and left him with his second podium on the trot.

It was hard to tell who was more emotional on the podium, Murphy or Glenn Seton - after 20 attempts Seton finally got to stand on the podium, and he liked it.

2003 V8 Supercar Championship Series Points - Top 15 (after round 10)
1. Marcos Ambrose 1681, 2. Greg Murphy 1605, 3. Russell Ingall 1493, 4. Mark Skaife 1487, 5. Steven Richards 1388, 6. Craig Lowndes 1382, 7. Rick Kelly 1324, 8. Jason Bright 1291, 9. Todd Kelly 1256, 10. Garth Tander 1176, 11. Paul Radisich 1148, 12. John Bowe 1135, 13. Paul Weel 1121, 14. Steve Ellery 976, 15. Steven Johnson 941

It took around 18 laps for race stewards to show the black-flag to the Skaife/Kelly car, in that time a near 40 second gap to third place was swallowed by a Safety Car. The stop pushed Skaife down to ninth and out of contention with a handful of laps left. "Unbelievable," Skaife said moments after the race, still shaking his head. "It is just a joke, it cost us a chance at winning Australia's biggest motor race... three in a row."

It isn't often in this game you see something that will live with you forever, and the performance of Greg Murphy at Bathurst is one such thing. His stunning lap in the shootout on Saturday left us all breathless, and Murph speechless - and that is no mean feat in itself. And then the way he backed it all up in the race was definite red hero stuff.

Okay, so he was our blue boy from Sandown, but how could we skip him this race. Steve Ellery is proving to all that being a small one-car team isn't going to hold him back. Two podiums in a row is worthy of a shout from the rooftops, and the tall ex-Victorian can feel he and his team have done the job well. Put a smiley face on the truck.