A couple of months ago no-one was talking of Garth Tander successfully defending his Bathurst crown with youngster Nick Percat in October.
The three-time Bathurst 1000 winner was struggling to make an impact in the V8 Supercars championship as his Holden Racing Team lagged far behind rivals TeamVodafone and Ford Performance Racing.
But over the past couple of rounds Tander has begun to force his way back into the front of the pack, suggesting he might be timing his run for another big day out at Mount Panorama on Sunday.
A fourth-place finish in the first of two races at Sydney’s Eastern Creek in August was followed by a another fourth with Percat at the first endurance race at Sandown in Melbourne.
It gives the pair hope they can retain the Peter Brock Trophy after what has been a forgettable year for Holden’s factory-backed team.
“Certainly our form at the last two races has been a turnaround from our form at Queensland Raceway in the middle of the year,” Tander said.
“Eastern Creek was encouraging and then to have the car on the front-row at Sandown and just miss the podium at the end of what was a pretty hectic race was a good form reversal for us.
“But in saying that we know that we still have quite a bit of work to do until we can legitimately challenge the front-runners.”
Tander credits a mid-season shake-up in the team’s attitude and the arrival of Englishman Tony Dowe as the team’s engineering and development manager as key components in the mini-revival.
With things outside the car starting to look brighter, Tander also believes 24-year-old Percat – who won in his first Bathurst 1000 start last year – will only be better for having run and won there last year.
But can the pair break the monopoly the championship’s top four have had on race wins this year and notch an eighth Bathurst win for HRT?
Well, if it’s going to happen anywhere, it can happen at Mount Panorama according to Tander.
“Bathurst is a pretty unique race. It’s a pretty unique racetrack,” he said.
“It requires a lot of different things to the majority of circuits we go to and if you look at HRT’s speed over the years at Bathurst it’s been very good.
“You look at our results over the last three years we’ve had two wins and a third. We’ve got pretty good form at Bathurst and if you look back at this time last year we finished fourth in the 500 and we went to Bathurst, were on provisional pole position and went on to win the race.
“Not saying we’re supremely confident, I’m saying we go to Bathurst with confidence in the fact that we know we’ve had a good car there in the past.”
