The rain was hammering down on Mount Panorama, and the forecast was grim. Qualifying was fast approaching, and Australia’s trickiest track was turning treacherous as the full field of cars prepared to set out to try to earn a spot in a top-10 shootout that would eventually be abandoned due to heavy weather.
Broc Feeney, the most hyped rookie since Craig Lowndes, was watching the rain fall and contemplating how little wet running he’d had in a Supercars machine.
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He’d completed fourth practice, before which the heavens had opened to douse the circuit, and had laboured to 20th before co-driver Jamie Whincup took the wheel and moved up to second.
With qualifying set to take place in similar conditions, the team made the call to deploy the experienced Whincup in qualifying rather than full-timer Feeney.
It was a move that raised eyebrows at the time, but it was indicative of the 19-year-old inexperience relative to the newly retired Whincup, the seven-time champion and four-time Bathurst winner.
And while Feeney was fast and certainly had no shortage of healthy self-confidence, the teenager had a certain reverence for the boss, who did all his winning as the young Gold Coast native grew up and in love with the sport. He was hardly about to rock the boat.
Broc Feeney and Jamie Whincup back in 2022.Source: News Corp Australia
That 19-year-old Feeney is barely recognisable for the 22-year-old title leader who’ll qualify for this weekend’s Bathurst 1000.
No longer a precocious rookie, he’s now the real deal. No-one has won more than his 12 victories or taken more than his 14 poles this year. He leads the championship by a commanding 158 points.
Having spoken at length about what he could learn from Whincup in his early years as a full-time in the sport, this year his mission is to retain the momentum he built through a dominant Sprint Cup campaign.
“I think always the enduros change how your season’s going and your approach and everything,” he tells foxsports.com.au. “But I feel like we always find another level when we come to this part of the year.
“The big one is I think our car’s changed a little bit from where we were 12 months ago, from the last time Jamie drove it. It [preparing] was mainly just about getting him comfortable with where the car’s at and what changes we’d like to do.
“Where we’re at, we probably drive it differently and all that sort of stuff, so Jamie’s probably not as used to where we’re at with the set-up. It’s just making sure he gets comfortable in that.”
But Feeney leaves no room for doubt: in 2025 this is his car.
“Obviously I don’t want to have to go back to something that I think was less competitive,” he continued.
“There’s no question mark over his pace — there’s never a question mark over his pace.
“I’m trying to get him comfortable again in the environment of driving 88, because he knows how to drive fast, it’s just about making sure he understands the new tools that we’re using because it’s probably a little bit different to what we’ve used in the past.
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]Jamie Whincup and Broc Feeney, drivers of the Triple Eight Race Engineering Chevrolet Camaro celebrate finishing in second place following the Bathurst 1000, part of the 2024 Supercars Championship Series at Mount Panorama, on October 13, 2024 in Bathurst, Australia. (Photo by Morgan Hancock/Getty Images)Source: Getty Images
“I’m just looking forward to it. I always love working with him. The big one for me is getting him out of the office and back into race driver mode.”
Whincup’s return to the race seat this year started with a clumsy crash with the sister car during the build-up to the Bend 500. The situation couldn’t have been more awkward, but he rebounded superbly, and with Feeney they had the pace to win but for a refuelling problem that dumped them to the back.
The seven-time champion admitted that getting back into the groove once a year was part of the co-driving challenge, particularly given he doesn’t have the benefit of calling the car his own.
“Once you get into it, all the memory flows back from my 20-year full-time career,” he said. “But you certainly feel quite rusty at the start.
“The co-driver life is different to main driver life because you’re in somebody else’s car — set-up for them, in their seat position and their ergonomics. You can fine-tune a little bit, but you’re very much the tourist, really, in somebody else’s car. Trying to get your head around that is always difficult.”
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That challenge is heightened given Feeney’s status as championship leader. Points is part of the equation — he could still be beaten to the first seed for the finals by Matt Payne and Will Brown — but it’s also about his momentum and confidence heading into the knockout rounds.
With the Sprint Cup looks increasingly distant in the mirrors, Feeney’s domination of the shorter races risks losing its relevance without a good overall return from the Enduro Cup.
“I just see Broc and his crew just doing a seriously good job,” he said. “They’re making sure that they’re minimising their weakness and that they keep working on their strengths as well.
“They’re in a really good place, but as we know, the way the year’s been changed with the points system, you have to perform at the end of the year, so we want to make sure we don’t go too hard too early and make sure we’ve got plenty left in the tank for the lats few rounds.
“The season of endurance is always an important factor of the year. If you’re strong at Tailem Bend and strong at the biggest race of the year, that always puts you in good shape and gives you good confidence going into the final few races. It’s critical.
“I feel like I’m a part of that. I play a big role being a co-driver, so the pressure’s on me to make sure I perform and do a good job.”
It’s a remarkable reversal from that tentative first partnership in 2022, but Feeney is quick to credit Whincup for the improvements that have led him to the top of the title table.
“I think I’ve learnt so much off him that I feel like we operate quite similarly,” he says. “I feel like I’ve learnt so much off him in the last couple of years that now when he jumps in my car, it’s not like, ‘Oh, hey, why haven’t you thought about all this stuff?’ because I’ve taken all those notes and put it into account to where we’re at.
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“Obviously we’ve had such a good year; I don’t really want to change the world going into the enduros, because of how strong we’ve been, but he’s still jumped in the car and had a couple of ideas on how to improve things, and I always take that on board and see what we can do to make it better.”
It’s not only Feeney’s who’s got better with time. His and Whincup’s partnership has also flourished since their 2022 recovery from 14th to fifth in Bathurst.
The following year they won the Sandown 500 together and would have scored at least a podium in Bathurst were it not for a gearshift problem.
In 2023 they finished a close runner-up in both endurance events.
Victory was on the cards in the endurance opener in Tailem Bend last month before the fuel problem cruelled their race.
Now attention turns to the sport’s biggest stage.
And with no championship implications as far as the points are concerned — Feeney is guaranteed a finals berth no matter what — together they can go all-out on taking the final step to the top of the podium.
“I always like to have a big swing at Bathurst,” Feeney says. “But for me and more importantly Jamie there’s not as much pressure on if you make a mistake.
“We’re going there to win.”
For Whincup it would be a fifth career triumph at Mount Panorama and his first in the dual driver-manager role.
“Broc’s in really good form at the moment, I think the car’s as good as anybody’s, so we’ve got a real opportunity and we’ve got to make sure we make the most of it,” he said.
“I’ve been lucky enough to win a few up there at the mountain, but I’ve had a few get away. I haven’t stood on the top step for a long time.
“It’d be nice. I’m not a greedy person, but it’d certainly be nice. That’s the goal, to try to get back on the top step.”