Supercars Legends / Australian
Garth Tander
A championship winner who kept finding new ways to win Bathurst, Tander finished his Supercars career with six Great Race victories.
By DriveAgent News · Historical profile · Records checked
The biography
The Western Australian entered Supercars with Garry Rogers Motorsport in 1998, won the 2007 championship with HSV Dealer Team and later became a sought-after endurance co-driver. His final Bathurst victory came with Matt Payne in 2025.
A champion before becoming the trusted co-driver
Tander’s later endurance reputation can obscure how substantial his full-time career was. He made his Supercars debut in 1998 after winning the Australian Formula Ford championship. A Bathurst win with Garry Rogers Motorsport followed in 2000; the championship title arrived with HSV Dealer Team in 2007.
His subsequent Holden Racing Team years brought further major victories. Later, sharing with Shane van Gisbergen at Triple Eight, he won Bathurst in 2020 and 2022. Those results made the move to endurance work a continuation of competitive success, rather than simply a reduction in driving duties.
A final win in different colours
Joining Grove Racing took Tander into a Ford after a career overwhelmingly associated with Holden. The partnership with Matt Payne delivered the 2025 Bathurst 1000 from 18th on the grid. It was Payne’s first win in the race and Tander’s sixth.
Tander announced his retirement from Supercars racing later in 2025. Finishing with a victory in a different manufacturer’s car gave that long career an especially fitting conclusion. His story illustrates the value of experience inside a developing team, as well as the breadth of the modern endurance specialist’s role: contributing to someone else’s breakthrough while still building a record of his own.