Shane van Gisbergen wins his second Bathurst 1000 with dominant performance

Shane van Gisbergen has won the 2022 Bathurst 1000, once again showing he’s the best there is in Supercars.

The 33-year-old Kiwi and his co-driver Garth Tander led for most of the race, despite starting from seventh on the grid.

Van Gisbergen repeated his feat from 2020, while only once over the last seven Bathurst 1000s has he finished outside the top five.

It has been an incredible month for him. He won the Jason Richards Trophy at Pukekohe, beating Waters in a stunning race on the Sunday.

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He also came third in his category and ninth overall in the WRC’s Rally New Zealand and now has won Bathurst again, to pick up a record-breaking 19th Supercars victory of the season, surpassing Scott McLaughlin.

This win all but confirms a third Supercars championship for van Gisbergen. Surely things can never get any better for him and we’re watching an incredible Kiwi driver at his peak.

Second was Kiwi Fabian Coulthard and Chaz Mostert and Cam Waters and James Moffat were third.

There was drama after the first corner with a number of cars colliding and spinning along mountain straight. Zak Best came out the worst and his race was already over, while Kiwi Jaxon Evans needed to get the front of his car covered with race tape to continue.

They completed one lap after the resumption, before a bigger incident with Zane Goddard, making a terrible mistake, rejoining the circuit at The Chase and cleaning out Andre Heimgartner and David Reynolds’ cars.

Thankfully, the race settled down after that, although safety cars were brought out for incidents involving Alex Davison, Macauley Jones and others.

With 100 of the 161 laps to go, the top three was Tander David Russell and Anton de Pasquale, with 24 of the 28 cars left in the race.

After 100 laps Tander had built a lead of 16.8 seconds over Russell. The following lap van Gisbergen jumped back in the car to take it home.

On lap 119 the race came alive again, when Todd Hazelwood put his car into the tyre barrier at turn two, triggering the safety car, so van Gisbergen’s lead had all gone.

When they restarted, with the racing coming down to a 38-lap shootout the top three was van Gisbergen, Brodie Kostecki and Chaz Mostert. Chris Pither was 12th and Richie Stanaway 16th.

With 23 laps to go Evans’ partner Jack Smith clipped a wall at Reid Park and limped back to the pits, before retiring while Pither’s car was also losing a lot of pace and he was shown a mechanical black flag.

Twenty laps from the end, Will Davison put his car into the tyres at turn two, leading to the eighth safety car of the day, which was quickly followed by the leading cars doing their final feel stop.

That wiped out another four laps and at the restart van Gisbergen had his toughest challenge yet, with both Mostert and Waters right behind him.

This time he wasn’t able to pull away as easily, but Mostert couldn’t make an overtaking manoeuvre on him and over the last 10 laps the result seemed inevitable.

Matt Payne, who was Lee Holdsworth’s co-driver, finished an impressive sixth, the car shared by Richie Stanaway and Greg Murphy was 11th and Pither came home 21st.