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BATHURST, Australia (April 26, 2026) — Grove Racing owner Brenton Grove is certain his team had the fastest machinery at the 2026 Bathurst 1000, but a catalogue of self-inflicted mistakes turned a potential triumph into a day of regret. Matt Payne and Will Davison crossed the line fifth in the #19 Penrite Racing Mustang, while Kai Allen and Tim Slade managed 20th after a troublesome run that featured a late brake failure.
Bathurst is the crown jewel of the Supercars season, and for a team chasing its first major endurance win since its formation, every detail matters. Grove Racing came into the race with strong momentum, but Sunday proved that momentum alone cannot overcome a sloppy pit-lane performance.
Grove was emphatic that the final results flattered no one. “We were the fastest car by a long way,” he told Auto Action. “We just made mistakes and buried ourselves in the pack.” With no Safety Car until the closing laps, the team had almost no opportunity to recover lost ground, leaving Grove to describe the race as “death by a thousand cuts.”
The problems ranged from a five-second penalty on Payne for contact with David Reynolds on Conrod Straight to a drive-through penalty for the #19 crew over a pitstop breach. The #26 car suffered a 15-second loss during a brake change, and a seatbelt issue on the first scheduled pitstop cost another 18 seconds. According to Grove, those errors left his drivers 25–30 seconds behind the leader before the late Safety Car arrived. “We did a good job to get back,” he said, “but at this level, if you don’t have track position and you bury yourself all day, you don’t move forward.”
Payne and Davison fought hard to salvage fifth, a result that keeps them in the championship picture, but the gap to the leaders at the finish was far larger than the car’s true capabilities.
Perhaps the most damaging mistake came during the first driver change. Grove Racing had started Allen in the #26 rather than co-driver Tim Slade, a deliberate tactic aimed at giving Slade a chance to race against the regular drivers later in the event. The undercut was the plan: get Allen into a quick stop and leapfrog Will Brown and Scott Pye. But the front seatbelt didn’t go in properly, forcing a longer stop. “We lost 18 seconds in the lane,” Grove explained. “We would have come out in the lead. Could have, would have, should have. We didn’t.”
At Mount Panorama, where overtaking is notoriously difficult, track position is like gold. Losing it on the first stop eliminated the team’s strategic options for the afternoon, making a recovery drive nearly impossible even with superior race pace. Allen’s 2m06.8888s on lap 4 was among the fastest of the race, a clear indication of the speed Grove was talking about.
Grove acknowledged that operational miscues are especially hard to swallow when the underlying performance is so clear, particularly given the team’s championship position. Both Payne and Allen are in the title fight, and Grove Racing is competing for the Teams’ Championship. “I said to the guys before the race last year, it was win at all costs,” Grove said. “This year is a very different scenario. We have a lot to lose as well, with both drivers in the championship and the Teams’ Championship. We had to be calculated, and we just didn’t do a good enough job.”
The contrast in mindset from 2025 to 2026 has been intentional. A year ago, the team could afford a full-commitment, all-or-nothing approach. Now, with more at stake, Grove Racing opted for a more measured strategy. It did not pay off, but the boss made clear the blame falls on the entire organization, not any one individual.
“We win and lose together,” Grove said. “There’s more than the pitstops that we got wrong today. Every facet of the business can and will improve.”
Immediate improvements are already on the agenda. Grove revealed that a post-race debrief had already started on Sunday night, with a deeper analysis planned before the next round on the Gold Coast. “We’re going to dissect this weekend to the smallest possible detail, put better systems and processes in place, and make sure those mistakes don’t happen again.”
Despite the exasperation, Grove found reasons for optimism. The team has traditionally struggled at Mount Panorama, so to have the fastest car at the circuit represents real progress. “We’ve never really been strong here before and we were the fastest car by miles,” he said. “That’s nice in one way, that we’re understanding what the car and the track want here. But once again, we didn’t perform.”
The weekend also offered a lesson in tire management and race pace versus qualifying. Grove Racing couldn’t extract the car’s peak performance in a single qualifying lap, but under race conditions, the Mustangs were consistent and fast. “Race pace was always better than qualifying pace,” Grove noted. “Today as the conditions heated up, it was probably even better.”
Now the focus shifts to the Gold Coast 500. Both Mustangs made it to the finish at Bathurst, which means not all was lost. The championship lead remains intact, and Grove is confident the team can compete in the Finals if it cleans up its act.
“We have two cars that finished,” he said. “We have both championship leads, and we go to Gold Coast and fight for another day.”
But the lingering sense of what could have been will not disappear quickly. A fifth place and a 20th place do not reflect a car capable of dominating Bathurst, and Grove knows it. The speed was there; the execution was not. “We were the fastest car by miles,” he concluded. “But once again, we didn’t perform.”
