This Bathurst comparison is the perfect display of a race car’s raw speed

SOMETIMES it can be easy to forget just how much faster a Supercar touring car is over a normal road-going production vehicle.

Luckily for us, someone went and invented the brilliant concept known as a Speed Comparison. It’s beautifully simple, put three different cars of varying power and speed on the race track, release them at different times, and watch them cross the finish line in an almighty scrap.

Holden put on one such display at the 2013 Bathurst 1000, and it is a wickedly tense example of how a race car is the final word in speed.

While watching a ’13 HSV Gen-F GTS chase down a 2002-spec HSV VX GTS 300 is entertaining enough on its own, the way the HRT race car catches both of them is gobsmacking.

Despite starting its lap of Mount Panorama almost 40 seconds after the VX leaves the line, the closing speed of the Supercar means the trio cross the finish line astern.

A similar experiment was done by Holden nine years earlier in 2004. However, instead of two road cars, the V8 Supercar faced off a VY Commodore SS, and Peter Brock’s iconic 1979 Holden Torana A9X race car.

The ’04 Speed Comparison wasn’t as close at the finish line, but showed that even a then 25-year-old race car can pants a high-performance road car on a hot lap.

The A9X was the same car Peter Brock and Jim Richards raced to victory in the ’79 Bathurst 1000, with a winning margin of six laps!