- The young driver claimed the Supercars Championship in 2023
- He backed it up with the Bathurst win at the weekend.
He’s the reigning Supercars champion and has just claimed the Bathurst 1000 crown, and now Brodie Kostecki has cleared up any misunderstandings about his strange nickname.
While the classic Australian trope is to add a ‘y’ or ‘a’ to the end of a surname to create a nickname, Kostecki doesn’t really lend itself to that method.
Other Australians get their nickname from memorable stories, and Kostecki, who earned the rude nickname ‘Bush’, certainly fits into that category.
The Supercars champion appeared on Triple M’s Mick & MG in the Morning on Monday after his Bathurst win and was immediately asked where the nickname came from.
“It’s probably not the first thing that comes to some people’s minds,” he said as MG and Molloy laughed at the crass implication.
‘Basically, long story short, I jumped out of a car going 100 kilometers per hour so as not to break any bones.
“And I landed in a bush.”
The revelation left radio hosts baffled, but the incident that gave the driver his nickname could have ended tragically.
Bathurst 1000 champion Brodie Kostecki (left) earned the nickname Bush, but not for the reasons you might think
The reigning Supercars champion had Triple M presenters Mark Geyer and Mick Molloy in stitches.
When he was just 21 years old, the rising Super2 rider had decided to leave that series to focus on the family team’s first PIRTEK Enduro Cup wildcard campaign.
To get used to the change, he headed to the Paul Morris Norwell Motorplex on the Gold Coast to gain experience behind the wheel of a VT Commodore.
His cousins Jake and Kurt Kostecki had joined him on the trip and were riding around the track and enjoying the experience until the car’s brakes failed.
“Kurt came in to drive and said the brakes felt a little soft,” Kostecki said in 2020.
“We said we’d take it easy for a couple of laps, cool them down and the brakes would work again.” They weren’t completely gone, but the pedal felt a little soft.
“And then we went down the backstretch and we were doing 120 km/h in the wet and Kurt went to hit the brake pedal and he went down.
‘So my first reaction was, I saw the light quickly and I thought, no, I’m going to take a different route, so I decided to jump… I just unbuckled my seat belt and jumped.
“The car was probably going about 110km/h at the time and I slid probably 150m into a bush, hence my nickname.
“Now everyone calls me Bush, I don’t even know what my real name is anymore.”