One driver is guaranteed to win the Darwin Triple Crown this weekend thanks to the first major relaxation of the rules for the Top End trophy in half a decade.
Rather than requiring a driver to sweep three key sessions over the weekend, this year the elusive Triple Crown will be won by whoever wins the round with the most points.
Darwin’s perpetual trophy has been notoriously hard to win since it was introduced to the championship in 2006 as a bonus incentive for drivers at Hidden Valley Raceway.
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Despite its 19-year history, the Triple Crown has been won just twice.
It took until 2019, 13 years after its inception, for it to be claimed for the first time, when Scott McLaughin met the criteria by winning the 42-lap Saturday sprint, scoring pole in Sunday’s top-10 shootout and winning the 70-lap feature race later that day.
It was won again the following year, when the rules were temporarily changed during Covid to award the Triple Crown to whoever won the overall round. The weekend’s highest scorer, Jamie Whincup, became the second to take the unique title.
Whincup has long since retired, but he remains the most recent winner, with the criteria later being tightened up again to make winning the Triple Crown close to impossible.
Prior to this year it’s required a driver to top three sessions over a weekend. Sometimes that’s meant three races, Last year, with only two races on the schedule, it required a double victory plus pole position on Friday.
Broc Feeney came achingly close to sealing the deal in 2024. Feeney is famously quick in Darwin, and he powered to victory in both races last season, but he missed out on pole by 0.205 seconds on Friday, denying him what would have been a worthy prize.
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In strong form this year in time for the sport’s arrival in the Northern Territory, Feeney is favourite not just for the weekend but also now to finally claim the Triple Crown, which will be awarded the weekend’s most consistent scorer.
He would have own it easily last season if it were awarded based only by points — or had it been doled out by the same rules used in McLaughlin’s era.
“I’m pumped to head back up to Darwin,” he said. “I’ve had some great results the last couple of years.
“I really want to win the Triple Crown, to be honest. I technically, in old terms, won it last year with two wins and pole position in the shootout on Sunday, but they changed the rules, so it’s something that I really have my eye on.”
Feeney consolidated his hold on the championship lead with a pair of victories and a fourth place to lead teammate Will Brown by 72 points.
After an opening three rounds dominated largely by misfortune, Feeney has finally turned his potential into results, with four wins and five podiums from the last six races to take control of the title table.
“It’s great to come off another solid round and just keep building momentum,” he said.
“Momentum’s the biggest thing right now, and I’m just trying to keep that going.
“Darwin’s been good to us before, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to be strong there again. We’ve just got to continue to work hard, and hopefully we can have another solid weekend.”
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CAN WILL BROWN FIRE BACK?
With Feeney in such strong form, the super consistency that won Will Brown the title last year may not cut it again in 2025.
The defending champion has been generally solid so far this year. He’s stepped on the podium the same number of times — eight — as Feeney. But he’s added just one victory to his career tally — and that win coming in Melbourne means it didn’t contribute massive points to his campaign.
He’s also being blitzed in qualifying, where Feeney has found another gear.
“I probably haven’t performed as good this year,” Brown said on the Drivers Only podcast before the previous race in Perth. “He’s done an awesome job all year.
“I feel like this year, he’s doing a better job, he’s stepped up, he’s getting better each year.
“Right now, he’s the benchmark in Supercars, when you look at what he’s doing, his qualifying performances and racing.”
But Perth looked like a turning point. Brown was notably more competitive, finishing second twice, to complete a three-podium run dating back to Sunday’s race in Tasmania.
If maintaining momentum is important for Feeney, it’s crucial for Brown.
“We had a great weekend in Perth,” he said. “We showed great potential throughout the weekend.
“I feel like we’ve got our race pace back, which was something that really allowed us to win the championship last year. It wasn’t necessarily our qualifying performance.”
But the reigning champion warned that the margins at the front of the field were too tight to take anything for granted.
“We’ve got a good grip on the cars lately, and hopefully that translates to Darwin, but you just never know right now,” he said. “Honestly, it’s competitive every round.
“The top five cars are spread by just over 150 points, and a DNF for anyone in Darwin and it could really hurt their championship in the top four.”
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CAN FORD BREAK THE STREAK?
If Feeney has been the form man in Darwin, Chevrolet has been the form marque, sweeping every race victory at Hidden Valley in the Gen3 era.
In fact GM domination runs even deeper than that: Camaro drivers have taken home all 15 podium trophies since the rule changes. Ford hasn’t had a look-in.
The closest it’s got to victory was Cam Waters’s pole position for the first race in 2023.
If Waters is to fly the flag again, he’ll have to end a barren run of results.
After dominating in Sydney with the first three victories of the season, he’s stood on the podium just twice more — a second place and a third place in New Zealand and Tasmania respectively.
He’s now 153 points off Feeney’s title lead. With three rounds to go in the Sprint Cup, his odds of winning the season’s first big piece of silverware is slipping away fast.
“I’ll be hauling ass now,” he told the Cool Down Lap podcast.
“We’ll make sure we roll out a fast car in Darwin with everything we’ve learned [in Perth]. Love it up there in Darwin.
Townsville, we always go good, and I haven’t been to [Queensland Raceway] for a long time.
“That’ll be a lot of fun over the next three rounds.”
But Ford’s hopes might rest instead with Walkinshaw Andretti United, where young gun Ryan Wood enjoyed a breakthrough weekend in Perth.
The young Kiwi collected his first pole and victory last time out, though he also copped more than his fair share of bad luck in two of the three races, suffering a technical problem and a crash that cost him at least one more victory.
There’s plenty of motivation there to strike back this weekend.
“Luck definitely hasn’t been on our side recently, but that car is super-fast,” he said. “I want to be converting that speed into strong race results this weekend.
“We have been building strong momentum the last few rounds, and ticking off my first pole and race win in Perth was awesome, that feeling is like no other.
“Darwin was a track myself and the team struggled at last year. It was the first time I had been at the track and I made plenty of rookie mistakes.
“I have really been focusing on the data and areas I can improve on as a driver coming into this weekend.“
Matt Payne can never be discounted, especially while he enjoys the status of lead Ford driver in the championship, but if he’s to make a splash this weekend, he’ll have to overturn years of underperformance in Darwin.
In every Hidden Valley race in the Gen3 era, Payne has finished lower than he started for an average race result of 20.4 — dire for a driver so used to sniping for victories and poles.
With Chaz Mostert and Thomas Randle also in the mix, Ford has plenty of chance to end its negative streak this weekend.
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WHO’S ON THE FINALS BUBBLE?
With only this weekend’s race and rounds in Townsville and Ipswich still to come in the Sprint Cup, some teams and drivers must be looking nervously at the title table.
As a reminder, Supercars will decide its champion based on a finals format this year that will eliminate all except the top 10 drivers on the title table from contention after the Bathurst 1000.
After five rounds and 16 races, the margins are tight.
The gap from Chaz Mostert in fifth and Ryan Wood in 10th is just 246 points, with James Golding in 11th only 27 points further back.
But perhaps more to the point, there are just 147 points between Cameron Hill in eighth and Jack Le Brocq in 15th.
Just as Hill enjoyed a decent points boost for winning his first race in Melbourne, a victory to any of these drivers could make or break their entire seasons — or potentially put them under pressure to pull out a big performance at the Enduro Cup rounds in Tailem Bend and Bathurst.
And Darwin has a habit of generating a surprise winner. In 2023 alone Mark Winterbottom and Jack Le Brocq took Team 18 and Matt Stone Racing to the top step to bookend the weekend.
The beauty of the finals system is the guarantee that several drivers will remain in contention in the final races.
The danger for some drivers, however, is that they risk their season ending far earlier than they might realise, and now is the time to prevent embarrassment.