Bathurst 1000 winner Chaz Mostert has thanked his idol Glenn Seton and been backed to win the Great Race multiple times by his co-driver, Paul Morris.
At different ends of the Bathurst experience scale, Mostert and Morris were on Monday still savouring their dramatic last to first performance at Mount Panorama the previous day.
Mostert steered the Ford Performance Racing Falcon across the line in first place in just his second tilt at the iconic event.
Conversely, Morris needed more than 20 tries, though Craig Baird and himself were declared victors in 1997, only to be later disqualified for Baird spending too long in their BMW.
“They (Bathurst 1000 wins) don’t come easy, but I predict he (Mostert) will win a lot more,” Morris said.
“You can’t have that good a form around the mountain and not become a multiple winner.”
One of the most meaningful of the many congratulatory messages Mostert got was one from Seton, a two-time Australian Touring Car champion.
Seton, who never won Bathurst but finished second three times, was a pivotal figure in Mostert’s development.
“One of my idols is Glenn Seton,” Mostert told AAP.
“He came close (to winning Bathurst) so many times. I bet he’s thinking ‘You little bugger, you’ve got it in your second year’.
“This one is for Seto a little bit as well, because he helped me out in the early days.
“I worked with Glenn in development series back in the support category days.
“He gave me the confidence as a race car driver in V8 Supercars.”
Mostert said the greatest influence on his career was his late mother Debra, who died four years ago.
“I remember going home from school when I was about five and all the kids around me were getting Pee Wee 50s or Pee Wee 80s,” Mostert recalled.
“I was like, ‘Mum, I want a motorbike’ and she said ‘no, no, it’s too dangerous’ and she said ‘four wheels or no wheels.’
“I heard of this thing called Go Karting and got into that and that was our family sport.
“There was about 28 to 30 weekends a year, we’d go racing as a family.
“Mum would write down the data off the little Alfano we had and dad would do all the spannering on the Go Kart.”
