Brodie Kostecki only needs to see the chequered flag at the Adelaide 500 to be crown the Supercars champion for 2023 after Shane van Gisbergen had his race at the Adelaide 500 blown up inside 26 seconds.
Heading into race 27 on Saturday, the penultimate race of the season, Kostecki held a 131-point lead over three-time Supercars champion van Gisbergen, who is leaving the sport to join the NASCAR ranks in America next year.
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To stay in touch with Kostecki, van Gisbergen needed to stay within 19 points of the championship leader, with 150 points still on offer on Sunday.
But the Kiwi veteran had his championship blown up within 27 seconds of the start of the race when Erebus Motorsport’s Will Brown — the teammate of Kostecki — ran into the barrier at turn four and left van Gisbergen with nowhere to go.
Van Gisbergen clipped the right rear of Brown’s car and suffered damage to his Camaro that gave his Red Bull team no choice but to pull him from the race.
“That is a sad sight for the front corner of the van Gisbergen car. That’s looking like it could be out,” Neil Crompton said on commentary.
“How is this for a story? Only seconds old into the race.”
From that moment on, Kostecki needed only to finish the race in 23rd position or higher to seal his maiden championship.
Mark Skaife added: “That’s going to have significant damage to deal with. Then it’s bitten this car.
“And van Gisbergen literally had nowhere to go. And he’s out of action.
“(Red Bull engineer) Andrew Edwards knows the story. (The incident is) under investigation. Race control confirming the contact between lap one turn four will be considered.
“Shane heads back into the garage. There’s not much you can see. He’s pulled a couple of gears, got up there to turn four and it’s game over. That was not in the script.”
Confirmation soon came that both Brown and van Gisbergen were ruled out of the first 250km race of the weekend as a result of the crash.
“I haven’t even worked up a sweat yet,” Brown said.
“Everyone blocks on the inside and if you can’t make it up the inside, you know everyone banks up so I went to the outside.
“I knew I had good overlap. I would have tucked in behind him if I wasn’t at least completely next to him.
“I thought he’d be able to see me and knew I was completely there but obviously not. Unfortunately, took out one of the championship leaders.
“We had a fast car today. It’s disappointing but in the end, that’s racing. There’s not much I can do about it.”