Over the weekend we witnessed one of the all time classic editions at one of the world’s favorite motor races down under at Mount Panorama in Bathurst New South Wales. It had accidents, battles, strategy, a red flag and some scary situations that have generated plenty of conversations in the hours and days since the event wrapped up early Sunday morning for those of us here in the US.
In case you’ve been under the proverbial motorsports rock, the International GT Championship held their first round of the 2026 season down under. Heading in, Mercedes-AMG was bringing down the most cars of any one manufacturer with teams choosing the three pointed star as their weapon of choice to attack the mountain. In qualifying, V8 Supercars superstar Cam Waters set the 2nd fastest ever time around the mountain in GT3 and put the #222 Mercedes on pole for the race with Craft Bamboo and 75 Express cars in 2nd and 3rd sweeping the top 3 for AMG.
In the race, Mercedes-AMG teams had the ultimate pace and were only challenged by the Corvettes and BMWs at various points through the race from darkness to daylight. At the start, the single Mustang entered in the race absolutely obliterated a kangaroo as it totaled the Mustang GT3 and fortunately didn’t injure driver Chris Mies, but definitely left him shaken. From the start, all the Mercedes cars and teams were competitive, and one of the fan favorites was leading the race with Ralf Aron when a Porsche GT3 car was stranded on the downhill, blind sections of the racetrack caught him entirely by surprise - the contact was devastating to both cars and nearly caught the 2nd and 3rd placed Mercedes cars, leaving Ralf with several fractures in his spine but fortunately as of this morning confirmed he is stable and will retain functions of all his limbs and extremities. We wish him only the best and a speedy recovery down in Australia.
Following the red flag that resulted, it was a sprint for just under 3 hours to the line and ultimately, the #888 of Maxime Martin, Maro Engel and Mikhail Grenier took the checkered flag, adding another overall win to Mercedes’ trophy case at the 12H. Behind them, the #45 car won the Pro-Am class and out of 10 cars that started, 7 finished.