By Barney Flagman

Bathurst delivered what Bathurst always threatens: a race so sharp at the edges that even the best hands came away nicked. Colby Mann won the Mount Panorama round with authority, converting pole into control and, crucially, into points. Behind him, the surprise package of 2025 kept its foot in it: Nick Mazza and Bryan Perez traded haymakers for the full distance and split the remaining steps on the rostrum, a duel that’s been brewing for weeks and finally boiled at the worst, narrowest possible place to fight. The tone was set by the league itself going in—“Bathurst will be won or lost in The Dipper,” we wrote in the preview—and the race obeyed the prophecy.

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Across the field, the mountain made true believers of the skeptics. Drivers talked afterward about how the car feels safe until the moment it isn’t; at “~90% it’s friendly,” one said, “over that, it gets mean.” Others simply posted the soundtrack: “The Mountains Win Again.” That
wasn’t melodrama—it was the data. Even with no cautions, we saw a rash of single-car
offs, wall kisses over the top, and disconnects; clean laps felt like currency, and most left
Bathurst a little lighter in the wallet.

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Still, form lines emerged. Mann’s victory mattered more than one line on a results sheet because Adam Miles, the season’s metronome to date, never took the green. The table flipped: Mann now leads the championship by 27 over Miles, with Bryan J. Kelly holding third. That swing slices deeper when you add the blunt fact that Miles will miss Rounds 10 and 11; barring chaos post-drops, he’s out of the title fight on math alone.

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Mazza and Perez deserve their own paragraph. They’re stylistic opposites—Mazza’s zerofuss rhythm versus Perez’s elbows-out urgency—and yet a lap later they arrive together. The Bathurst podium cemented the pattern; the chatter right after the flag was pure mutual
respect between two drivers who’d just wrung each other out for 45-odd minutes. If Mann is the pace car for this era, Mazza/Perez is the story you tune in for on Sundays.

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There were new names in the camera shots, too, and not by accident. Jason Birkhimer,
Travis Shoemaker, Jason Potter, and Thomas Fotos all translated practice speed into race craft at The Mountain. The stats say that’s not a one-off. Shoemaker’s quietly banked five top-tens in seven starts; Potter’s hit two top-fives in just four; Fotos is three-for-three on
top-tens since appearing; and Birkhimer’s two starts have both landed inside the top ten,
one on the box. That’s the profile of a second-half shake-up.

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Which makes Barber Motorsports Park this Sunday such delicious timing. The paddock is buzzing that Barber is tailor-made for the F4: lots of medium-fast direction changes where the aero wakes the car up—but not everywhere. Turn 2 drops away just as the downforce lets go, which means bravery has to be tempered by mechanical grip and hands-and-feet feel. More than one veteran warned that pit entry is a trap, too; the racing line and the entry
line are essentially the same, at very different speeds. Expect radio calls of “pitting this lap”
to be worth tenths and tempers. And if you needed an off-track reason to smile, the on-site sculpture garden never gets old.

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Zooming back out, the title picture is suddenly simple and complicated at once. Simple,
because Mann controls his own destiny and Kelly’s relentless floor keeps him in the money.
Complicated, because after Round 9 the series moves to two drop weeks. That mechanic tends to reward consistency, punish one-race heroes, and—this season—could vault a Mazza or a Perez if their late-season surge continues to cash top-five checks. The spreadsheet says one thing; the driving says another. Barber will tell us who we should believe.

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Notebook: A few shards worth pocketing from Bathurst to Barber. The mountain humbled plenty, and it wasn’t just rookies; even seasoned hands admitted to “spin-twice-per-week” frustration. Over on the practice servers, drivers have been workshopping FFB and telemetry workflows, and you can feel a cultural shift toward “practice with purpose.” That matters at Barber, where micro adjustments at T2 and the “fall-down-the-stairs” final
sector will separate the patient from the impatient.

However the drops shake out, the grid heads to Alabama with a clear thesis: Mann is the
benchmark, Kelly is the conscience, and Mazza/Perez are the accelerants. Sprinkle in the emergent quartet of Shoemaker, Birkhimer, Potter, and Fotos, and Sunday looks like exactly the kind of race where a season turns.

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