Matt Payne took provisional pole position for the Bathurst 1000 after a qualifying session of fine margins at Mount Panorama.

Payne and his Grove Racing Ford streaked around the 6.213km circuit in a time of 2m05.6452s to edge out fellow Mustang pilot Cameron Waters by a scant 0.0060s.

“It just seemed to hook up really nicely and it just seemed to turn really well at ‘The Grate’,” he explained after the lap.

“The previous practice we did not have such a good run on green tyres. I knew the car was better than that. I knew we were going to be in the top five, but P1 is pretty cool.”

Waters, who nearly had a crash at Forrest’s Elbow during the session, revealed he had also suffered a reliability scare in the early stages.

“It was a pretty intense session, I had an engine problem to start with and that cleared,” he said.

“Everyone is trying so hard, even in practice one, it was crazy how fast everyone was going. I am just lucky I am not one of the ones crashing.”

The session featured a pair of red flags, with the first coming with 23 minutes remaining on the clock as David Reynolds lost control of the rear of his Team18 Chevrolet Camaro at The Dipper, collecting the wall where team-mate Warren Luff had performed a miraculous escape earlier in the weekend.

Will Davison, Dick Johnson Racing Ford Mustang GT

Photo by: Edge Photographics

The second came due to a crash at the same corner after Shell V-Power Racing driver Will Davison destroyed all four corners of his Ford Mustang on his final push. 

This crash ruined Broc Feeney’s attempt to top the session, although he remained the highest-placed Chevrolet driver in third. Prior to the red flags being displayed, he had been 0.25s up on Payne’s benchmark.

The Triple Eight man was 0.0081s faster than 2023 polesitter Brodie Kostecki, who set the fourth fastest time and clattered the wall at Sulman Park, requiring a mid-session suspension change which cost eight minutes of track time.

Highlighting how close the session was, Kostecki’s time was 0.0194s away from Payne.

Championship leader Will Brown secured his shootout position in fifth, having spent the majority of the session out of the window, while Chaz Mostert was sixth. 

Andre Heimgartner, Jack Le Broc, Anton de Pasquale and Richie Stanaway rounded out those who will contest Saturday’s shootout.

As a result of causing the red flags, both Reynolds and Davison saw their best times struck from the record, leaving them 21st and 16th respectively.

The Supercars will be back on track at 10:05am Australian Eastern Daylight Saving Time [12:05am BST], with a one-hour practice session for co-drivers only. There will be another hour’s practice at 1:10pm [3:10am BST] and the top 10 shootout is due to begin at 5:05pm [7:05am BST].

Bathurst 1000 Qualifying Result

FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has insisted the federation is currently unable to support a 25-race Formula 1 calendar.

The current Concorde Agreement allows for 25 races per season. But although there is a massive demand for a slot on the F1 calendar – with Argentina being the latest to express interest in hosting a Grand Prix – F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali last year stated that he would like to stick to 24 races for the time being.

“I think 24 is the right number”, he said on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast. “I would say this is the number which we should target to be stable for a long time.”

According to Ben Sulayem ‘everything’ is on the limit at the moment for the FIA, with 24 events on this year’s schedule.

“You cross a barrier where you need two teams, we can’t have [more]”, Ben Sulayem told Motorsport.com when asked if adding one extra race would already pose a problem. Logistically, then I have to have two teams.

“Can the drivers take it? I just want to know. Let’s just be sensible and logical about it. Can the drivers take it physically and mentally? This is a question I will ask the drivers. And what about the teams?”

“As for the FIA, we cannot do it with this one team. We have to have a rotation of two teams, when it comes to the staff on the ground.”

Stefano Domenicali, CEO, Formula One Group, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, President, FIA

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

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But stating that Formula One Management is “sensible”, Ben Sulayem acknowledged: “They never came back and said: ‘Oh, we need more.’ No way they did. What they are after is quality and that’s why we have this good relationship with them.”

“I mean, I will not stop [them] to go to 25, because it is their right, OK? [In the end] it’s up to them.

“But they are the ones who don’t want to add [more races at the moment]. Because they know that it becomes [a matter] of fatigue then. So they have their own reasons [for keeping the amount of races on 24].”

Red Bull has revealed how Formula 1’s financial realities played their part in it losing key staff members like Jonathan Wheatley and Will Courtenay this year.

The Milton Keynes-based squad is undergoing a period of organisational restructuring, with a number of its senior figures having accepted jobs elsewhere and set to move on.

Its chief technical officer Adrian Newey is departing for Aston Martin, sporting director Wheatley is becoming team boss at Sauber/Audi while head of strategy Courtenay is also taking a step up to join McLaren as sporting director.

The three high-profile departures have grabbed headlines off the back of a season where the squad has faced challenges both on and off track.

And while some have pointed to these key departures as being a sign of a team in trouble, moves like this are nothing out of the ordinary with it pretty common for rivals to come along and offer big money deals to poach experienced staff.

Formula 1’s cost cap rules take into account the wages of all relevant operational personnel at a team, excluding the top three earners.

While the identity of these three individuals at each squad is not made public, it is thought that neither Wheatley nor Courtenay formed part of the top three at Red Bull.

Red Bull says that what has changed though is that being able to make counter-offers has long gone because, in a cost-cap era, spending is so limited.

Jonathan Wheatley, Team Manager, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Speaking about the challenges of keeping hold of top personnel in current F1, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said: “You can’t have a Galactus because you can’t afford it. You’ve got to look at bang for buck and it forces you to make some really tough decisions.

“It’s tough. Jonathan was a very good sporting director, but he was an expensive asset. So you have to weigh things up.

“When he got the opportunity to move to Audi, it was: ‘Do you know what? I think you should go for that because of the way that regulations are. We’re limited in scope and what we can do for you here.

“‘So, if you have an opportunity to further yourself and go and earn significantly more money, go for it.’”

Horner says that he fully understands the motivations for senior staff members wanting to move on – especially if circumstances allowed them to take a position that was not available at Red Bull, plus a boost to their wages.

Their departures are not all negative, though, because they allow others within the current organisation to move up to more senior roles – giving them career progression that stops them feeling trapped and feeling that they need to look elsewhere.

Red Bull pitwall

Photo by: Erik Junius

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“Jonathan has been here a long time, and he had an opportunity to become a team principal,” added Horner. “He didn’t have that here, and his role was becoming ever more one dimensional in that he was never here. He was always at a racetrack.

“He’s moved on and it’s allowed others to naturally step up. You’ve got to have that evolution.

“It is the same with Will Courtenay and strategy. He has been here for 20 years. We talked about other roles within the group. He was offered a bigger role on a very high salary from McLaren, and at that point you have got to say: ‘Good luck. Go for it.’

“But at the same time, it gives an opportunity for Hannah Schmitz to move up, which, if she hadn’t had that opportunity, she’d have been a prime target for somebody.

“In any organisation, you’re going to have evolution. We had less than 5% turnover here, so we have tremendous loyalty within the team.”

While the spotlight that comes on senior staff movements is inevitably greater than it is for lesser-known personnel, Horner says that natural turnover in F1 means organisations are constantly evolving and changing.

“When I came here in 2005 we assembled a fantastic team,” he said. “If I look around the engineering office, particularly trackside compared to when we were winning with Sebastian Vettel and Mark Weber, during that 2010 to 2013 period, I think there’s only three people in the engineering office that were there at that point, out of probably the 25 that are trackside.

“There is Paul Monaghan, who’s still with us. Michael Manning, who is still with us and does all the starts, and it’s probably only Jonathan and Will that were also there.

“Hannah was a graduate from Cambridge University at the time, but the rest of the team: the race engineers, control engineers, everything evolves, and you have to have that within any organization.”

Newey didn’t want to leave F1

The highest profile departure Red Bull has experienced though is Newey, who has signed a big money deal for Aston Martin. He will start work for the Silverstone-based squad next March.

Adrian Newey, Aston Martin Formula One Team

Photo by: Aston Martin Racing

And while the design genius has made a huge contribution to Red Bull’s success over the years, Horner thinks their partnership was coming to a natural conclusion anyway.

Asked if the early season turmoil at Red Bull triggered the change, Horner said: “I think you’ve got a perfect storm that’s very easy to say, well, this caused that, and that caused this. But the reality is that all the things are totally unrelated.

“Adrian leaving the team was something that already, at the back end of 2023, he was growing somewhat, I think, conflicted in his own mind.

“The agreement that we had was at the end of ’25 he was going to step back from F1 and really just be a mentor. Otherwise, I was going to lose the other [technical] guys to some rival teams.

“But I think he felt that his time in F1 wasn’t done, and so he made decisions for his own reasons which are understandable.

“The deal he’s got from Aston with equity and so on, is something that quite simply wasn’t on the table here.

“I can understand, Adrian wants another run around the block in F1, and as a shareholder and partner in a team, I certainly don’t blame him for that.

“But we live in a cost cap world now, where F1 is very different to what it was even five years ago, where 90% of our time is spent focused on: what can you afford to do within the cap?

“With the $140 million that you’ve got to spend, every penny has got to be spent very wisely. And of course, over the years, the bigger teams, sometimes they carry a bit of fat in them. What the cost cap has driven is efficiency.”

Ferrari chief Fred Vasseur reckons the fact Lewis Hamilton is joining from Mercedes confirms that his team is heading in the right direction.

Despite having a deal in place for next season, Hamilton broke his contract with the Silver Arrows to force through a move to Ferrari for 2025.

The switch rocked F1 as well as Mercedes, but Vasseur, who worked with Hamilton previously in GP2 and the F3 Euro Series, says he knew the seven-times world champion always had ambitions to join F1’s most-famous team.

He said: “Yes, it was not that difficult to convince Lewis. I remember that in 2004 we were together (in the European F3 championship) he at the time was tied to McLaren-Mercedes, but he already had in mind that sooner or later he would go to Ferrari.”

Speaking at the Festival dello Sport organised in Trento by the Gazzetta dello Sport, the Scuderia team principal added: “We talked about it some time ago, he always had this desire in mind, but of course, he is a driver who wants to have guarantees in terms of performance, for him this aspect is always in the first place.

“If he chose to join Ferrari, it confirms to me that we can have the right car. This is the ultimate goal, a driver like Lewis does not come to us on vacation and from my side, I think we are in the right place in terms of performance.

“We need a step forward and I can say that we are devoting a lot of resources to our next project.”

Frederic Vasseur, Team Principal and General Manager, Scuderia Ferrari, with Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-AMG

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

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Hamilton will join up with Charles Leclerc, who himself raced for Vasseur in the junior categories before making the step up to F1.

And Leclerc says that he is unfazed by Hamilton’s arrival and will welcome the challenge of him being on the other side of the garage.

Leclerc said: “I don’t think there is jealousy. Fred is not my girlfriend! We love each other, we value each other but there is no jealousy.

“I was always aware of the negotiations between Lewis and Ferrari, I knew there was this possibility, everything was very transparent and I was the first to say that for me to have a team-mate of this depth would be motivating.

“When you have a seven-time world champion driving your own car it’s a super interesting challenge, then I have a very good relationship with Lewis and I’m sure that will be the case in the future.

“Having said that I really want to say that we also had a great partnership with Carlos [Sainz], we worked very well and our relationship has always been great.

“In a few months, we will turn the page, and I admit I am looking forward to the new challenge with Lewis, every team-mate always has very strong points and weaker ones, so you can always learn. I see this as a great opportunity.”

Takamoto Katsuta has set out goals after being benched by Toyota for Rally Chile, as he prepares for his World Rally Championship return at next week’s Central European Rally.

Katsuta rejoins Toyota’s line-up after it temporarily dropped its full-time driver for the visit to Chile last month following a rough run of results.

After undergoing a reset, the 31-year-old jumped back behind the wheel of his GR Yaris Rally1 for a pre-event its last week ahead of Central European Rally’s tricky asphalt stages with a clear objective in mind.

“I’m looking forward to being back in the car and driving on a totally different surface for the last two rallies of the year,” said Katsuta.

“I really like driving on asphalt and I hope to find a good feeling and perform well.

“Central European Rally is a big challenge for everybody with a lot of surface changes and dirt on the road. Last year, the Friday on Czech roads was especially difficult with rain and a lot of cuts.

“With that experience it should be easier to return this year but there will still be many new stages, so we need to focus on making good pacenotes and communicating well with our route note crew.

Takamoto Katsuta, Toyota Gazoo Racing WRT

Photo by: Toyota Racing

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“I will try to be patient, be there to score points for the team and if everything goes well, it will be easier for me to push at Rally Japan [the season finale].”

Speaking at Rally Chile, Toyota team principal Jari-Matti Latvala empathised with how his driver would be feeling after the decision, but is confident that Katsuta would return stronger.

Latvala also revealed that improving his pacenotes had been identified as area that would benefit the Japanese driver.

“We have had a few phone calls with him and of course it is never a nice situation as he wanted to come to Chile to drive, but after a few days he was thinking about it and understood the situation and was willing to work and try to improve himself to come back stronger,” said Latvala.

“To understand it first is never nice for the driver. But at the end when you do it and come back, sometimes you realise that this is something good. We have seen that in the past with other drivers [that have been benched]. Adrien [Fourmaux] is a very good example and it also happened to Ott Tanak and Elfyn Evans in the past.

“First of all I wanted him to switch off from rallying, then we wanted him to work with the co-driver to try and improve the notes as we realised in Greece that maybe there is too much information in them, which is then taking away the focus on the driving and the road as he has to listen too much.”

Looking ahead to next week’s rally, Latvala added: “The target will be to have a solid rally, score some points and find a good feeling in the car ahead of Rally Japan.”

Oliver Oakes might be able to lay claim to being the quickest team principal in F1, but for the meantime however, he has his work cut out in saying the same for his Alpine team.

Oakes, 36, is the latest incumbent in charge of the Enstone-based team that in recent seasons has seen it slump steadily towards the back of the grid. 

Now, though, after a period of turbulence, he is hoping that alongside Renault’s CEO Luca de Meo and Flavio Briatore, who is acting as a special supervisor to Renault’s F1 project, the trio can bring some stability and deliver an upturn in results for the beleaguered team.

Oakes has racing pedigree. His father Billy was the founder and owner of the former Formula Renault and British F3 team, Eurotek Motorsport.

He started karting at just four years old and in 2005 was crowned the world karting champion. At one point was part of the Red Bull Junior Team alongside Sebastian Vettel, Brendon Hartley, Jamie Alguersuari and Sebastien Buemi.

When we meet in the Alpine hospitality unit, the subject of his early motorsport career quickly pops up, and he jokes that if he suggested he was the quickest team boss, then he might be getting a text message from McLaren’s CEO Zak Brown, who also continues to compete, rather sharpish.

“Sometimes I was quick,” he says when asked by Motorsport.com what went wrong with his own driving career, “but ultimately not quick enough, hence why I am on this side of the fence! I had my moments. [Red Bull motorsport advisor] Helmut Marko has been pretty brutal that I did not translate that into cars. I think he he is half-right. I did in some cars but not all of them.

Oliver Oakes, Carlin Motorsport. Formula BMW Testing, Silverstone, England

Photo by: Edd Hartley

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“I don’t know why it did not work out. Perhaps I should ask myself that and do some soul searching! When you look back to then, obviously when you were young, and there were things you could have done differently. There were some things that didn’t go your way. It is a mixture of things.

“Like everything in racing, there is not one silver bullet. But I also feel quite lucky from the other side that I did do all of that; from karting all the way up to F3 level and came out of it and achieving a dream another way.”

Oakes is referring to the Hitech GP team he set up in 2015 and now runs successfully across six different championships, including Formula 2 and Formula 3.

Having grown Hitech GP as a business and a successful team, Oakes feels he can utilise his experience as a former driver turned team owner to good effect at Alpine, where he will now focus his full attention.

He added: “Definitely having a little bit of the driving background helps, you have to be careful not to do too much, because you think it is the engineers or its the car…and its not the driver. But then you can balance that and go too much the other way.

“Actually it is kind of strange. If someone asked me today, what do I think has been the biggest help having taken this job, from my background, I think it is a mixture of all of it. 

“The driving bit was pretty decent but I was lucky my mum made me go to school. Although I used to complain like hell to her on a Monday morning and going in for 8am after I got back in the early hours from racing in Italy!

Paul Aron, Hitech Grand Prix

Photo by: Formula Motorsport Ltd

“And then also building and growing my own company, from the business side; those six teams, 100 people and building that up.”If I put it all together in a mix, I feel quite fortunate that I had all of that and I guess you call it a different education. I had a racing education.”

When James Vowles took over at Williams from Mercedes, he hit the headlines for mentioning how he was shocked the team was using an Excel spreadsheet for managing more than 20,000 car parts, saying it was “impossible to navigate”.

Oakes says he has not had anything comparable during his first few months at Enstone but does admit there are areas of the campus that require some investment.

“I sort of knew different facets of it from the last couple of year,” he said. “There has obviously been a lot of change. When Otmar [Szafnauer] was here, he was a mate, so through catching up with him occasionally, you’d learn things.”I arrived without anything much predetermined because you have to take things as they come and I dare say you never really get the truth until you get down in the weeds and see it. You have to suss things out for yourself.

“But since I have been here, lots has been talked about over the years, what has been done and for what reasons. At the moment I am front foot forward and we need o push on and the past is in the past.

“Some parts of Enstone have had a lot of investment and there are some parts that are still as they were, not quite as far back as Flavio’s time, but there are a lot of good bits and a lot of bits that we can keep improving but I think actually I would not say anything like [what Vowles found at Williams].”

Oakes replaced Bruno Famin, who was only in the role for just over a year while Szafnauer also had a similarly-short stint before being axed. And the Brit’s arrival coincides during a turbulent period as Renault ceases its F1 engine operation, causing disharmony within Renault’s plant in Viry-Châtillon.

Oliver Oakes, Team Principal Alpine F1 Team, Flavio Briatore, Executive Advisor, Alpine F1

Photo by: Alpine

Add into the mix Oakes will be working alongside the divisive character that is Briatore, who ran the Enstone team during its most-dominate period when it won the constructors’ and drivers’ championship with Fernando Alonso in 2005 and 2006.The Italian’s presence will only magnify the pressure on Oakes, but he says it is “a nice pressure”.

He added: “There is pressure for myself, yes, because I don’t like walking to the back of the grid. The job comes with pressure but I think it is different…I think years back a sport’s psychologist, who told me some thing that sticks with me. Pressure is like something that comes out of the shower as water pressure.

“I actually see leading a F1 team as a responsibility. There are a thousand people who rely on you for leadership to make the right decision. That’s one word I would use, and the other is competitive. You want to be the best.I am pragmatic in that I know F1 is complexed you have a lot of big teams that are well run and have been doing it for a long time with a lot more stability than us.

“But actually, I am quite excited about that because the great thing about F1 is that you are always judged constantly and if you can do a good job, everyone sees it. I put it on myself because I want to do well.

“Having Flavio is a great help and big part of why I committed to coming on this journey. I call it the project. He pushes because he wants to see this team go back to the front of the grid and anyone know knows him knows that Enstone is his baby.

“We all have a first love in life and he would not mind me saying that. For him, it is something that he really cares about and is what attracted me to doing this, and also working with him because he is hugely experienced. He’s hugely successful whether that be in F1 or his restaurant businesses and you know that he is committed.

“Ultimately maybe right or wrongly, I sat there and tracked back looking at teams that became successful in F1 and most of the time it was because of really strong leadership at the top and that can be two, three or four people really aligned and that is normally that is the owner and the senior management of the team.When I spent time speaking to him and Luca [de Meo], you could see their passion for the project. You could see that age is a number is is pretty about what drives you.”

Oliver Oakes, Team Principal, Alpine F1 Team

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Oakes though, is looking to stamp his own mark on the Alpine team. Insiders have praised his openness and willingness to communicate and already there is a sense of the mood lifting within the organisation and finally a feeling that the team is finally pointing in the right direction again. 

“There are a lot of different management styles,” he says. “It is interesting because you can see a real mix today. There was a bit of a trend of entrepreneurs, guys who started their teams and then ran it. Then there was another trend of ex-engineers being team principals.

“But everybody does what best suits their background. I don’t claim to be the best engineer or the best businessman, or the best driver. 

“I am all about, ‘if we are going to be successful we need to have the best people and a good culture to empower those people’. Those are the simple things we need to get right and something Enstone did really well in the past.”