- Young driver claimed Supercars Championship in 2023
- Backed that up with Bathurst win on the weekend
He is the reigning Supercars champion and just claimed the Bathurst 1000 crown, and now Brodie Kostecki has cleared up any misunderstandings about his strange nickname.
While the classic Aussie 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 Aussies get their nickname get their nicknames that stem from memorable stories, and Kostecki earning the rude-sounding moniker ‘Bush’ certainly fits that category.
The Supercars champion appeared on Triple M’s Mick & MG in the Morning on Monday following his Bathurst triumph and was immediately asked where the nickname came from.
‘It’s probably not the first thing that comes to mind for some people,’ he said as MG and Molloy laughed because of the rude implication.
‘Basically, long story short, I jumped out of a moving car at 100km an hour to not get any broken bones.
‘And I landed in a bush.’
The revelation left the radio hosts in stitches, 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 hosts Mark Geyer and Mick Molloy in stitches
When he was just 21, the rising Super2 driver had elected to abandon that series to focus on the family team’s maiden PIRTEK Enduro Cup wildcard campaign.
To get used to the change, he headed to the Paul Morris Norwell Motorplex on the Gold Coast to get experience behind the wheel of a VT Commodore.
His cousins Jake and Kurt Kostecki had joined him for the trip and they were haring around the track and enjoying the experience until the car’s brakes failed.
‘Kurt went in to drive and he said the brakes felt a bit soft,’ Kostecki said in 2020.
‘We sort of said, we’ll just take it easy for a couple of laps and cool them down and the brakes will come back again. They weren’t completely gone but the pedal was just feeling a bit soft.
‘And then we went down the back straight and we were doing like 120km/h in the wet and Kurt went to press the brake pedal and it went to the floor.
‘So my first reaction was, I saw the light quickly and thought, na, I’m going to take a different route, so I just decided to jump out… I just undid my seatbelt and hopped out.
‘The car was probably doing like 110km/h at the time and I slid probably 150m up into a bush – and that’s how I got my nickname.
‘Everyone calls me Bush now, I don’t even know what my real name is anymore.’
