On this week #6 - When Bathurst pulverised the record books
One year ago this week, German driver Maro Engel set the fastest-ever official GT3 lap around the epic Mount Panorama circuit – the most fabled track in Australian motorsport – with a time of 2m00.881s in the qualifying shootout for the Bathurst 12 Hours, driving a Mercedes-AMG.
Of course, there will always be a debate about what a fastest lap really is: some people think that only race laps count, and Christopher Mies probably believes that his 1m59.210s lap of Bathurst is the fastest-ever in GT3, which it would be – had he not been at the wheel of an unrestricted Audi R8 LMS in the Bathurst Challenge event, in November 2018.
Engel certainly thought that his lap was the best-ever. “It's amazing. I'm a bit lost for words,” he said, after stepping out of the car last year. “The grip level this weekend has been amazing. It's partly due to the new tyres but also just the grip around this place. It's mega.”
And that wasn't the only record set at Bathurst this week last year, as the winning crew (another Mercedes, driven by Jules Gounon, Kenny Habul, and Luca Stolz) covered a new benchmark of 323 laps during the 12 hours, totalling just over 2000 kilometres. Perhaps even more unbelievably, the top three at the finish were separated by just 1.4 seconds. No wonder many people have called it the greatest Bathurst 12 Hours ever raced.
As Engel mentioned, this record-breaking performance in 2023 was helped by Pirelli's P Zero DHF tyre, racing for the first time in Bathurst – with just one tyre now used for all the classes, including the less powerful GT4 category.
This tyre has proved so successful that it's been carried forward to this year – and with more evolutions on the cars, the Bathurst records could fall even further when the racing action gets underway from February 16-18.
To give you an idea of just how quick Engel's lap was last year – and just how amazing the Bathurst circuit really is – it was beaten by only one other machine all weekend: the Red Bull RB7 Formula 1 car driven on a demonstration run by Liam Lawson, who went on to star in last year's F1 championship with AlphaTauri.
No official lap time was taken for Lawson last year, who almost certainly wasn't running at race pace, but it was reckoned to be in the region of 1m56s: meaning that Engel was less than five seconds slower around Bathurst than a Formula 1 car.
As for Lawson, he described it (at the time) as “the coolest thing I've ever done in my life.” So whatever you're doing this weekend, don't miss Bathurst – it's free to stream on the SRO ‘GT World' YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GTWorld
