Bathurst 12 Hour: BMW Team WRT clinches sensational 1-2 finish

BMW Team WRT put on a spectacular show for the 51,372-strong crowd at Mount Panorama Circuit and executed a masterful strategy to reclaim Australian glory after their maiden Bathurst 12-Hour win in 2018. Kelvin and Sheldon van der Linde partnered with Augusto Farfus to win Australia’s International Endurance race.

It is the first 12-Hour win for all three drivers and WRT’s second overall, with the winning trio completing 306 laps, just over 1,901 kilometers of racing.

Kelvin and Sheldon van der Linde become the first brothers to win a major Enduro at Mount Panorama, since 1997 when David and Geoff Brabham won the Bathurst 1000 in a BMW 320i.

The squad’s BMW sister car rounded out a sensational 1-2 for the Belgian team, with Valentino Rossi, Rafaelle Marciello, and Colin Weerts collecting runner-up honors.

It is MotoGP legend Rossi’s first podium in his third attempt at Mount Panorama, coming on a shining day for the BMW squad.

Bathurst-resident Kenny Habul’s SunEnergy1 Mercedes AMG rounded out the podium, with Habul and Mercedes sports car aces Jules Gounon and Luca Stolz standing on the podium for the fourth consecutive year together.

The intensity was up from the first corner of the 12-hour race, with hard battles and a number of incidents littering the early going of the race.

Two particularly heavy crashes took part within an hour of each other, the first when Ryan Sorensen spun into the concrete wall at McPhillamy Park, collecting Marcel Zalloura’s Audi in the process

Sorensen was transported by road to Bathurst Health for further assessment and later released.

The second major incident of the race took place when Habul and Grove Racing’s Stephen Grove made contact at the crest of Skyline, ricocheting Grove into the barriers and causing his Mercedes to briefly get airborne.

Grove emerged from his wrecked Mercedes under his own power, and was later transported by road to Orange Health, where tests revealed damage to his back, with the veteran driver to undergo further testing at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital.

Supercars stars Chaz Mostert and Will Brown put in a valiant effort to finish fourth overall in their Ferrari with Brazilian Daniel Serra.

With strategy stacked against him, Mostert was forced to make one more pit stop than the top three, leading the Gold Coaster to make a scintillating late charge of flying laps to make up ground, only to run out of time before he could reach the podium places.

A strong weekend crowd of 51,372 attended the three-day event, the second-highest figure in 12 Hour history, which included a record 2,700 campsites filled with race fans.

The Meguiar’s Bathurst 12 Hour is proudly supported by the NSW Government through its tourism and major events agency, Destination NSW.

2025 Bathurst 12 Hour Results