Ryan Walkinshaw is bullish about the chances of Toyota shocking Australian motorsport by winning the Bathurst 1000 for the first time after the Supras’ stunning 1-3 finish at The Bend enduro just over three weeks ago – just as long as the team’s new engine behaves itself.

Chaz Mostert and Fabian Coulthard took the chequered flag by nearly 20 seconds, with Ryan Wood and Jaxon Evans two places behind. The result raised questions about whether the Walkinshaw TWG Racing Supras are capable of winning Australia’s most iconic race, and a poll on Supercars.com saw fans install the Mostert/Coulthard combination as the favourite.

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Last year’s Bathurst victor, Matt Payne, is very wary of the threat they pose, saying “they’ve got a real chance of winning the whole thing” now that the team’s running a revised engine. Walkinshaw didn’t try to hide his optimism when he was asked about the team’s prospects.

The Supras have been fast all year but have often been held back by poor reliability. Their immense turnaround at The Bend, which was Toyota’s first Supercars race in excess of 200km, could be a sign all that is changing as their B-spec engine ran just fine.

“We spent a fair bit of time doing our previous A-spec engine, and every single week there was a new change that had to happen, either by us or by Toyota or by the sport forcing a different change or changing the rules, even into the first round of the season,” Walkinshaw told Supercars.

“Obviously the result of that is that it meant that a lot of our validation testing was kind of obsolete because there was so many changes made after it. We ended up going into the season with an engine that wasn’t validated to the standards that we would have wanted.”

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Walkinshaw said the B-spec engine had a small issue in the first of the two events it’s been used in, but that was resolved for the round at The Bend, where all five Supras finished. He’s now “pretty confident” in the latest version of the mill. 

“When the engine is reliable, we’ve shown that we’re pretty fast,” he said. “So that’s kind of the focus this weekend [at Bathurst] – ensure that we finish the race, all five Supras, finish the race, and hopefully get a good result and hopefully get some podiums, probably the top step.”

However, Walkinshaw is far from impressed with another engine-related development for the 1000, after testing found that Ford’s engines were losing power at lower barometric pressure. The Blue Oval has been allowed to change its set-up as a result, with Speedcafe reporting that the teams will get a larger restrictor and a change to their camshaft timing.