12 Hours at Bathurst Almost Broke Us

Our first special event. Mount Panorama. 6.2 kilometres of road that doesn’t forgive anything — and we were doing it with two drivers instead of three. Matti wasn’t in the car. The plan changed. The goal didn’t: finish.

Race Setup

This was the first 12-hour we’d ever signed up for. The Bathurst 12 Hour is the special event we picked to mark the start of the season — Mount Panorama is the one circuit everyone has an opinion on, and most of those opinions involve walls.

Matti had to step out at the last minute. That left Andy and Nico to share twelve hours between them in the Porsche 911 GT3 R (992). Two drivers across half a day of racing on a circuit where one misjudged kerb sends you into the scenery before you’ve finished the thought.

We weren’t there to chase a class win. We weren’t there to set a fast time. The honest goal was to take the car to the line at hour twelve with both drivers and four wheels still attached. Pace was secondary. Discipline came first.

Qualifying & Start

Qualified P20 from a 50-car field. Not bad — but the position barely mattered. In a twelve-hour, qualifying is just the seat you’re given before the long shift starts.

Andy took the opening stint. Sun not yet up, track cold, tyres colder. The kind of start where the right move is no move at all. He held position, watched the field stretch out into the dark, and let the laps come to him.

No big gambles, no early-stint heroes. The pace was good. P20 became something better, lap by lap, as the drivers who’d over-extended themselves in the first hour started writing themselves out of the race. Survive the opening. That was the entire brief.

The Stints

Then it broke.

Midway through Andy’s second stint, a damaged Ferrari understeered into us on the mountain. Tow. Five minutes lost. P36. There was nothing to be done about it — wrong place, wrong moment, someone else’s car doing something we couldn’t predict. We took the loss and got back on track.

Andy pushed every lap, every sector, clawing back to P25 before handing to Nico. Three hours in the seat, back hurting, knees aching. The kind of stint where the timing screen doesn’t show the cost.

Nico had prepared hard for this race — but on a G29 wheel and playseat, the mountain asks a different kind of discipline. His goal wasn’t pace. It was survival. Two spins at the same corner cost him time. Then a driver ignored a yellow flag and drove straight into him. Four minutes of repairs. On his final lap of the stint — wall contact at the bottom of the mountain. More repairs.

And then something shifted. Two clean stints followed. No incidents. No drama. The confidence came back. That’s the internal win that nobody sees on a timing screen.

Hour nine. Andy back in the car. Red bulls, coffee, psyched up. First lap back — an Acura went for a gap that didn’t exist on the mountain. Another tow. Another five minutes. Back to P26.

He drove angry after that, taking risks he wouldn’t normally take. Two hours in, the anger faded into something worse: fatigue. Every kerb went straight into his wrists through the direct-drive wheel. He started leaning forward on the straights just to relieve the pressure in his shoulders.

With twenty minutes left, P24. Comfortable. Then two laps from the finish — P23 went into the wall on the mountain. We inherited the position.

What We Learned

P23. From 50 cars. After two separate wall hits, two tow penalties, and twelve hours where the car was lost and reclaimed three times.

The goal was never the position. The goal was to finish, and we finished.

Two-driver endurance is its own category of physical event. Three hours in the seat is a different problem than two, and it shows up everywhere — wrists, shoulders, focus on lap 60 versus lap 20. Direct-drive wheels punish you for every kerb at Bathurst, especially Skyline down to Forrest’s Elbow.

Nico’s race was the lesson worth remembering. He started rough. Spins, repairs, contact he didn’t cause. The natural response is to back off and accept being lapped. Instead he rebuilt the rhythm and brought the car home cleanly across his last two stints. Discipline, then pace. Survive, then push.

That’s the race within the race.

Setup Notes

We ran the Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) on iRacing with a stiff-but-forgiving baseline rather than a qualifying setup. For a 12-hour at Mount Panorama, reliability matters more than the last tenth of a second over Skyline.

A few notes for anyone trying this circuit on a sim rig: lift the FFB sensitivity if you’re on a direct-drive wheel — those kerbs at the top of the mountain will fatigue your wrists faster than you think over a long stint. Brake bias forward in cold conditions, walk it backwards as the track temperature rises. Tyre pressures slightly under target out of the pits so they’re working by the end of the out-lap.

We didn’t fine-tune. We shipped baseline. For our first 12-hour, that was the right call.