Most of us were stuck to the sofa all day Sunday taking in all the sights and sounds of the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 for another year. But sadly, there were some within our ranks who had other duties to perform on Sunday, for them – here’s the low down.

This year’s 49th annual Bathurst 1000km race was won by Garth Tander and Nick Percat. The HRT pair were followed by Craig Lowndes and Mark Skaife, pole-sitters Greg Murphy and Alan Simonsen, FPR’s Mark Winterbottom and Steven Richards, Team BOC’s Jason Bright and Andrew Jones and van Gisbergen and McIntyre.

The all-kiwi crew of Shane van Gisbergen and John McIntyre finished up a hard-fought sixth overall.

After starting the race from the third row of the grid ‘the Giz’ was looking comfortable running in the top-five during the early stages of the race. As was McIntyre once he took over the #9 SP Tools Falcon – until he was turned around by Marcus Marshall and at The Elbow and lost 15 places getting going again.

Between them van Gisbergen and McIntyre made the places back up. And van Gisbergen retains third place in the championship points standings. But afterwards everyone in the Stone Brothers Racing team rued the opportunities lost as a result of the Marshall incident.

Shane van Gisbergen said, “Things were looking OK until Johnny got turned around. I pushed hard and we recovered to some extent but I’m pretty disappointed with Marcus (Marshall).”

John McIntyre also chipped in, “Things were definitely looking good early on. We had plenty of pace and the car was feeling really good. (But that said) we were really lucky today because the punt from Marcus could have ended our race. We never gave up and Shane probably deserved a better result but we did well enough to preserve his Championship position.”

Team Vodafone’s Jamie Whincup and Andrew Thompson were one of the many hard luck stories of the race, with alternator problems dropping them out of contention late in the race.

As a result Whincup’s teammate Craig Lowndes has taken over the lead in the series points standings from Whincup and van Gisbergen.

There is now a two week break before the 11th round of this year’s V8 Supercar series on Queensland’s Gold Coast in a fortnight’s time.