- Young driver claimed the Supercars championship in 2023
- This was backed up by Bathurst’s 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 Aussies get their nicknames from memorable stories, and Kostecki, who earns the crude-sounding moniker “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 crude implication.
“Actually, long story short, I jumped out of a moving car at 60 miles per hour to avoid broken bones.
“And I ended up in a bush.”
The revelation left radio presenters in stitches, but the incident that earned the driver his nickname could have ended tragically.
Bathurst 1000 champion Brodie Kostecki (left) was nicknamed Bush, but not for the reasons you might think
The reigning Supercars champion had Triple M hosts Mark Geyer and Mick Molloy in trouble
At just 21, the rising Super2 driver had opted 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 joined him on the trip and they ran around the track enjoying the experience until the car’s brakes failed.
“Kurt went in to drive and he said the brakes felt a little soft,” Kostecki said in 2020.
“We kind of said, we’ll take it easy for a few laps and cool them down and then the brakes come back. They weren’t completely gone yet, but the pedal just felt a little soft.
‘And then we went down the straight and we were doing about 75mph in the wet and Kurt hit the brake pedal and it fell to the ground.
“So my first reaction was, I quickly saw the light and thought, no, I’m going to take a different route, so I decided to jump out… I just unbuckled my seat belt and jumped out.
‘The car was probably going about 70mph at the time and I probably slid 150 yards into the 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.’