THE ODD COUPLE
The odd couple
In a special edition of Up Front, Foges chats to Bathurst champions Shane van Gisbergen and Garth Tander.
The Kiwi ace spoke to Foges about his maiden Bathurst triumph, the Supercars Championship without fierce rival Scott McLaughlin, the upcoming Gen3 regulations, his overseas racing prospects and of course becoming the final factory Holden winner in the 1000.
Now a four-time winner at The Mountain, Tander declared the Triple Eight Race Engineering Holden Commodore the best he’s ever driven in the event, while also explaining how he overcame a lack of racing miles to be the top performing co-driver of the event.
Here is a snippet, which is featured in Auto Action #1798. Out now.
MF: Now that you’ve had time to think about it, what’s your reaction to finally winning the Bathurst 1000?
SVG: It’s still hard to put into words. Certainly, it was a weird one, not having all my family and friends there. They normally come every year, and dad (Robert) has a good group of mates and I have a good bunch of mates who go camping and have a good time. Unfortunately, the one time they’re not there, I get it done. I really missed them not being there, but we’ll have a good time when I get out of my isolation back here. It was still really cool, though, and a good way to finish a strange year.
MF: Having come so close three times before, is it a relief to finally win the Bathurst 1000?
SVG: I don’t think of it as a relief, I just think of it as the single biggest race win I’ve ever had. I’ve never put focus on it being a race that I’ve needed to win or failed at winning. I think of it as just a massive race – biggest race in this part of the world, for sure – and just stoked to have won it. The other ones, looking back on them, they hurt, being close three times, but that’s part of racing. We get closer more than we actually win them sometimes.
MF: What about the absence of your arch-rival Scott McLaughlin?
SVG: I think there are plenty of people that’ll step up and replace him. I think Cam Waters will be the main one. He’s been building momentum. For sure, Scotty’s been a great competitor the past few years. We’ve has some really good battles. He’s going on to bigger and better things, but I’ve enjoyed the past five or six years racing against him.
MF: Four-time Bathurst 1000 winner. How’s that?
GT: Surreal, to be honest with you. If you asked the 21-year-old Garth when he was just starting out in Supercars would you take one, it would have been “Absolutely!” So win a fourth 20 years after the first one is pretty amazing.
MF: Is it the best team for which you’ve ever driven?
GT: Oh, look, that’s hard to answer because I’ve only spent four race weekends with the team. But in saying that, they have a fantastic record, they have been incredibly welcoming to me, given that through the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s we had a fairly healthy rivalry going when I was at HSV Dealer Team and HRT versus Triple Eight. But they have been amazingly welcoming to me in the organisation and gone out of their way to make me feel like I was part of the team. And the execute incredibly well – and they’ve proved that time and time again.
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