What the Sydney Supercars opener told us about the season ahead

Cameron Waters will be a happy man after the opening round of the 2025 Supercars championship at Sydney Motorsport Park.

The Tickford Racing Mustang driver left Sydney with 315 points from the three races. Only one other driver in Supercars history has scored 300 points for the three wins and 15 extra for three fastest laps, and that was Shane van Gisbergen at The Bend three years ago. But Waters added an asterisk to van Gisbergen’s marker; he took pole for all three races as well…

The second of Waters’s three wins will be talked about for years and what a spectacle it was. After watching the race live, this writer had already rewatched the final five laps three times in less than 24 hours; the race was a blockbuster and readers are encouraged to find a replay online and settle in.

As happy as Waters would be after such a dominant performance, Will Brown has just as many reasons to be smiling. Whatever the defending champion was up against over the weekend, he pushed back, turning 11th on the grid into fifth in Race 1 and fifth into third in Race 2.

But it was on Sunday when he was at his best. After the main qualifying session he was down in 17th on the grid for the final race; that was the graphic that viewers saw on the screen and a position many had destined him to. But while the TV coverage was jumping the gun, Brown aborted a second flying lap, pitted for a tyre change and blazed around at near-race pace on his out-lap to scramble across the line with nine seconds to spare to start one more lap. It worked.

Brown scraped into the Top 10 by 0.0018s. In the Top 10 qualifying decider he cashed in that chip, jumping to fourth on the grid, and made it up to second in the race. By contrast, the driver who did start 17th, Nick Percat, was stuck in the midfield chaos and only rose to 15th.

Even the most ardent Brown fans must recognise that he needs to polish his qualifying performances, but he is in the conversation for being the best Supercars has seen in terms of fightbacks, a mantle currently assigned to either Jamie Whincup or Mark Skaife.

There were plenty of talking points over the first weekend of the new campaign and one of them was the new-for-2025 season finals system. That will, in mid-October, see the top 10 drivers in the points partitioned from the rest and have their points reset, so that over the final three rounds of the season, drivers will be eliminated from title contention until just four go to the final two races on the streets of Adelaide to fight for the trophy.

That has also raised the question: when is the time to talk about who is going to make it into finals contention? Three races into a 34-race season, it just might be now. At Tickford Racing, Waters is first in the points and Thomas Randle sixth. Triple 8’s Brown and Broc Feeney are second and fourth respectively, split by Walkinshaw Andretti United’s Chaz Mostert in third.

Matt Payne of Grove Racing sits fifth with Randle sixth, followed by the relocated duo of Anton De Pasquale, who moved from Dick Johnson Racing to Team 18 in the off-season, and Brodie Kostecki (Dick Johnson Racing). The 2023 champion took the seat vacated by De Pasquale and already looks at home in a Ford Mustang. PremiAir Racing’s James Golding sits ninth, followed by Brad Jones Racing’s Andre Heimgartner.

There is not a huge gap to the best of the rest, led by Jack Le Brocq, who is just four points back from Heimgartner. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if, even if the order looks different, the top 10 drivers remain the same from now until 12 October at the end of the Bathurst 1000.

Brown and Kostecki are title-winning drivers. As the first Ford driver in 691 days to lead the championship, Waters will have more wins ahead of him. Five of the other drivers in the top 10 are race winners and the remaining two, Randle and Golding, have looked like the two likeliest first-up winners for some time.

Even at this early stage of the season the challenge for the remaining drivers and their teams will be to demonstrate that they are capable of getting to the front of the chasing peloton and closing the gap to Supercars’ top order. With 31 races to go, the actual order of top 10 will ebb and flow, but many have already shown their hands – and the Supercars finalists might just be set.