The Mountain: Why Mount Panorama Is the Most Loved Circuit in the Southern Hemisphere

It was built with borrowed government money by a mayor who lied about what it was for. Nearly 90 years later, it's the spiritual home of Australian motorsport.

The best race tracks in the world all have something in common: they weren't designed by committee.

Monaco was carved out of city streets. The Nurburgring was built through a forest in the middle of nowhere. And Mount Panorama exists because a small-town Australian mayor in the middle of the Great Depression decided to commit a minor act of government fraud to get it funded.

The Mountain, as it's known to anyone who cares about motorsport, is a 6.213 km street circuit draped over a hill in Bathurst, New South Wales. It has a 174-metre vertical difference between its highest and lowest points, grades as steep as 1-in-6, and a long straight where touring cars have been clocked at over 300 km/h. It is a public road when racing isn't happening. People drive to their houses on it.

And every October, it hosts the Bathurst 1000, a race so embedded in Australian culture that it rivals the Melbourne Cup as the country's biggest single-day sporting event.

Built on a Lie (A Very Good One)

In the early 1930s, Bathurst Mayor Martin Griffin had a vision: a purpose-built racing circuit on the mountain overlooking the city, with fast straights, hairpin bends, and the kind of elevation changes that would push drivers and machinery to their absolute limits.

There was one problem. The Depression was in full swing. Nobody was handing out money for race tracks, oddly enough.

Griffin's solution was elegant. He applied for federal unemployment relief funding, the kind being distributed to build useful public infrastructure, and told the government he was constructing a scenic tourist drive. He actually got the money and instructed the engineers to widen the corners as they went, making them race-suitable.

By March 1938, the Mount Panorama Scenic Drive was officially open. Before the tarmac had even fully cured, they organized the first race weekend for Easter that same year. Two days of motorcycle racing, two days of cars. A few canvas tents for a paddock. No barriers between the spectators and the track to speak of. The circuit has come a long way since then. The spirit, somehow, hasn't changed much.

Sacred Ground — In Every Sense

Before it was a race track, long before Griffin ever drew up his plans, the mountain had a name and a meaning.

The Wiradjuri people, the traditional custodians of the region, called the mountain Wahluu, a sacred initiation site for young men. In the Dreamtime creation story, a Wiradjuri warrior named Wahluu was killed by his brother in a dispute, and the spilled blood angered Baiame, the creator spirit, who caused a volcanic eruption that formed the mountain over Wahluu's body.

The circuit now carries its dual name officially: Mount Panorama/Wahluu. It's a detail that adds genuine weight to the place. Drivers talk about the Mountain like it has a personality, a will of its own. The Wiradjuri knew that long before the first racing engine ever turned a wheel here.

The Layout: Beautiful, Brutal, Unforgiving

Mount Panorama does not ease you in. Coming off the start-finish straight, you brake hard for Hell Corner, a tight right-hander that immediately launches you onto Mountain Straight, one of the longest and steepest climbs in motorsport. The road narrows. The walls get close. You're heading uphill at serious speed toward a crest you cannot see over.  This is where it gets interesting.

At the top, the circuit opens into the Skyline section which is a series of fast, blind corners across the summit where the car is light over the crests and the margin for error is essentially zero. Miss your line up here and there is nowhere good to go, other than in the bin. The barriers are close, the drops are steep, and the circuit has a long memory for drivers who get it wrong.

Then comes The Dipper, a sharp downhill left-hander that transitions directly into Forrest's Elbow and then Conrod Straight. Conrod is where the track shows its other face entirely. Long, fast, and relatively open, it's where the cars hit their highest speeds. Before a chicane was added in 1987, it was a full mile-long straight with a hump in the middle that was getting the faster cars airborne. Tom Walkinshaw was timed at 290 km/h through here in 1984 in a Jaguar. After the chicane came in, the turbocharged Sierras of the early 1990s went even faster.

Shane van Gisbergen hit 300.5 km/h during a pre-race session in 2023. On a street circuit. In a touring car.  Yep, that happened.

By Falcadore - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6407669

Peter Brock and the Making of a Legend

No circuit in the world is more associated with a single driver than Mount Panorama is with Peter Brock.

Brock won the Bathurst 1000 nine times. Nine. 9.  Nueve.  He won it in different eras, in different machinery, with different co-drivers. He won it in a way that felt inevitable — like the Mountain had chosen him. Fans called him the King of the Mountain, and the name was never questioned by anyone who watched him race there. When he died in a rally accident in 2006, the race trophy was renamed the Peter Brock Trophy in his honor.

The Brock era coincided with the golden age of the Ford versus Holden rivalry, the factory war that turned the Bathurst 1000 from a race into a national institution. Families split along Ford and Holden lines the way they split along football codes. The Mountain was where it got settled, once a year, in front of the biggest TV audience in the country.

The Lap of the Gods

In 2003, the Bathurst 1000 ran a Top 10 Shootout — a single-lap qualifying format where the fastest drivers in the field go out alone and put everything on the line.

Greg Murphy went out in his Holden Commodore and drove a 2:06.8594 — a time so far beyond what anyone thought possible in a touring car at Bathurst that it became known simply as the Lap of the Gods. Murphy went on to win the race outright with Rick Kelly. When people talk about what this circuit is capable of producing when a driver and a track find each other at the exact right moment, that lap is the reference point.

By Kytabu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36966511

You Can Drive It For Free

Here's the detail that surprises people who haven't been: Mount Panorama is a public road. On non-race days, anyone can drive it. No ticket. No booking. You just show up.

The speed limit is 60 km/h, enforced by Bathurst Police who patrol the circuit regularly. You won't be setting any records. But you will drive Hell Corner, climb Mountain Straight, navigate Skyline, drop through The Dipper, and run down Conrod on the exact same tarmac where the Bathurst 1000 gets decided every October.

People make the drive in hire cars, campervans, family SUVs. And some of those houses alongside the circuit? People live in them year-round.  On a different timeline, I'd probably live in one of those... The only road in or out runs through the circuit itself. Imagine your commute.

What the Mountain Means

There are circuits that are technically impressive. There are circuits that are historically significant. And then there are circuits that mean something to people in a way that goes beyond the racing itself.

Mount Panorama is that kind of place for Australia. It's where Peter Brock became a legend. Where Greg Murphy produced one of the greatest laps ever driven in a touring car. Where a Depression-era mayor with a borrowed budget and a creative relationship with the truth built something that outlasted everything around it.

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The Mountain deserves a place on your wall.

Shop our Mount Panorama wall art — available on poster, canvas, maple wood, and aluminum.