Matt Payne leads the championship for the first time in his career, Grove Racing, Wanneroo Raceway, contract speculation, driver market, Triple Eight’s struggles, Ford Mustang, Gen3

In the battle to win the Supercars title, getting to the top of the points standings is the easy part.

Staying there? That’s much harder.

That’s the challenge facing Matt Payne for the first time this weekend in Perth.

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Payne seized the outright lead of the championship standings for the first time in Townsville, where a win and a pair of podium finishes moved him 92 points ahead of the deposed Broc Feeney.

Triple Eight’s troubles left Feeney vulnerable, but Grove’s powerful ascendancy — it took the teams championship lead one round earlier, in Darwin — put Payne in a position to capitalise.

At a time the competition is tightening at the front, 23-year-old Payne has powered ahead in just his fourth Supercars campaign.

“It’s been a bit of a journey to get here,” he tells the Fox Sports Pit Talk podcast. “The last three or four years as a team we’ve really been gathering some momentum, but it’s really good now to have taken that first top step in the drivers championship and before that as well in the teams championship.”

Payne’s journey to the top began with a sensational victory in Adelaide at the final race of his rookie 2023 season.

He backed that up with another win and three more podiums in his second campaign, and he added five more wins and another handful of podiums last season.

We’re only just past the halfway mark of 2026 but already Payne has a trio of victories and 10 other podium trophies in his cabinet.

A fixture at the top this season, from his last 11 starts he has nine podiums, including three wins, making him by far the sport’s most in-form driver.

The momentum has been irresistible.

“I think everyone was pretty stoked here in the team to finally have the orange numbers on it,” he says.

“But by no means is the job close to being done. There are still so many races to go, and to go with that, there’s enduro season and then there’s finals season. There are so many so many different elements to come.”

One of those elements is the lead itself. Payne is the benchmark for the first time. He’s the driver the others are pursuing, his consistency the bar against which his rivals are measuring themselves.

“You could get wrapped up in that mindset a little bit,” Payne says, but he denies it will change his or the team’s approach.

“I definitely am still focused on the way we’ve been going.

“I think the mindset everyone has in the team and how we structure our weekends and how we go into them has been really good. We’re getting into a really good routine now. Every round feels like it’s just clockwork now, which is really good.

“I don’t think it changes anything for me, but it certainly is cool to have a car in the garage with the orange numbers.”

‘NO MARGIN ANYMORE’ FOR TOP TEAMSConsistency wins championship, but consistency has arguably never been harder to come by in Supercars.

Six different drivers have walked away as overall weekend winners, and only two have more than one round victory.

The top four drivers in the championship are separated by just 195 points, the closest margin at the halfway point in the championship in a decade.

Those four drivers represent four different Ford brands.

Grove leads all of them in the teams championships standings.

It’s an impressive feat in itself, but it’s all the more notable for Triple Eight being the team its usurped on the way up.

Triple Eight’s first season as the Ford homologation team has been difficult, to say the least. Though there have been some clear bright spots, its bad weekends have been uncharacteristically bad, and it’s failed to get either driver onto the podium for six races in succession.

It’s been interesting to watch from the Grove garages, now at the top of the pit lane.

“I can see it’s definitely tough for them,” Payne says. “You can see visually that the car looks pretty technical to drive a lot of the time.

“There’s just no margin anymore in the field. When you feel like you’re having an off day, you know about it in terms of just results, points, everything like that.

“There’s absolutely no room for error in any form — driving, set-up, design, whatever. It can be anything. You feel it on the day if you haven’t quite nailed it.

“I’m sure that they’re going through it — they’ve been there a few times before — although this time it is a little bit more of a slump than we have seen previously.”

In an era in which the cars are more similar to each other than ever, there’s undoubtedly a Mustang experience gap at play in Grove coming in over the top of the sport’s modern powerhouse.

“It’s just the small things, because in our sport the margins are so tight” Payne says. “All of the crew have been working super hard on just the set-up and how we roll the car out for each weekend.

“That’s been our real strength this year — we haven’t felt like we’ve had to come from behind everyone else.

“I feel like we have a pretty good understanding of where the car needs to operate around. That’s really been the key behind it.

“Last year I still felt like sometimes, even though our bad weekends were still just within the top 10, they were just within the top 10. We weren’t challenging for wins all the time, which I think we’re starting to get on top of now, which is really obviously important for points.”

Grove has been wary this season of assuming Triple Eight will remain on the canvas, at times downplaying the difference between the two teams as partially circumstantial.

It’s a harder argument to mount with so many data points now in favour of Grove, but Payne is cautious of the dormant challenge.

“By no means are they out of contention,” he says. “They’re still second in the championship, and Broc’s still only just behind me in the championship.

“It only takes one round to get yourself back on your feet, like we’ve seen with Tickford, and to be back in the game, and then you can just carry your momentum from there. I’m sure they’re going to fight to try and do that.”

‘GOOD TO PUT THAT TO BED’

It also takes only a moment to fumble, and being at the top of the Supercars means there are more ways than one to fall down.

Even before Payne took top spot this season, he was subjected to some of the off-track pressures that come with being one of the sport’s top performers, with intense speculation over his future with the team.

It’s an open secret that General Motors has been courting the Kiwi as a star signing for its Supercars stable, which lacks firepower and is struggling for results.

The matter came to a head in June, when he was denied a NASCAR Cup wildcard with Chevrolet-backed Richard Childress Racing because of Grove’s Ford relationship.

It led to a firing-off of variously pointed press releases from both Payne’s manager, Michael Patrizi, and Grove, which reaffirmed its hold on the New Zealander after having invested in his junior career.

But what looked destined to become an almighty blow-up was shut down when Payne committed to sticking with the team through to the completion of his contract at the end of next season via a message on social media.

If the high-profile saga rattled him, he didn’t show it, with four podiums from six starts across Tasmania and Darwin during that time setting up him to take the title lead at the following round in Townsville.

“I think it comes back to the structure that I’ve had around my driving and the team I’ve had around me, especially personally,” he says.

“I’ve obviously got my manager, Michael, who takes care of a lot of that business, which I’m very fortunate to have. That’s allowed me to focus on what I need to do, and that’s keep driving fast, because we have fast race cars out on the track.

“It’s been really good to just solely focus on that, and he’s obviously taken care of the rest, but at the same time, it’s been good to put that to bed now and just have my sights set fully on the championship this year.

“Being able to focus solely on that I think has been a real benefit for us.

“But at the same time, I don’t feel like I really got affected through that phase. I feel like our performances really shone throughout those couple of rounds, and I think we did really well to get through that.

“But it’s always nice to be focused on the championship, eyes forward and know what the goals are and try to achieve those.”

THE SPRINT CUP AWAITS

The next two rounds could present as major obstacles to those goals, being the two events that will decide the winner Sprint Cup and the recipient of an automatic finals qualification.

Neither this weekend’s Wanneroo Raceway in Perth nor the following round at Queensland Raceway in Ipswich were among Payne’s strongest venues last season, with QR his second-lowest scoring weekend of last year’s Sprint Cup.

With he, Kostecki and Waters dividing up the Townsville podiums almost exclusively between them, we’re set up for high-stakes finish to this part of the campaign.

“It’s just so easy to have an off day in this championship, so we’re all working really hard to make sure that in Perth we come out the gates strong and we can fight for the wins on all two days,” he says.

“QR is definitely an interesting one for us. I felt like we really struggled there the most last year in practice … I think on Friday we were back 18, 19, 20 — sort of in that region — and when you’re seeing those numbers on the dash, it’s not ever that confidence inspiring.

“I know QR is going to be tough — it’s another small track with not much margin — but I’m looking forward to the challenge.

“We’ve come so far from that point. Even the last two or three months have been a huge shift for us.

“It’s going to be really cool to roll out for both of those tracks and see how we go.

“I’ve got pretty high confidence from the rest of the season that we’ve done already that hopefully we’re going to be pretty strong.

“I really love going over to Perth. It’s one of my favourite tracks. It’s short but it’s still pretty technical. I’d really like to get a win around there.

“I think it’s really cool to be in the position we’re in now, and then eyes forward for the next two rounds.”

Having summited the title table, the hard work really begins this weekend in Perth.