In its race debut, the 2002 Bathurst 24 Hour, Tander qualified the bright yellow #427 car (nicknamed the "Nuclear banana") in second place behind the N-GT Ferrari F360 driven by Brad Jones. After taking the lead from the John Bowe driven Ferrari at the start, the car suffered an early flat tyre which dropped it to second behind the Cirtek Motorsport Porsche 911 GT3 of David Brabham, while the Ferrari had already suffered the first of two engine failures early on and was out of contention. Then, just a few hours into the race, the entire fuel cell of the Monaro needed to be replaced, dropping the car 13 laps behind the Porsche. The team overcame the fuel cell problem as well as the car becoming jammed between gears just before sunrise after Nathan Pretty was hit by the BMW 318i of Debbie Chapman in The Chase, which also caused damage to the driver's side door. The Monaro spun and stalled, jamming the gearbox, forcing Pretty to get out and rock the car back and forth to clear the problem, a task made difficult by the Monaro's Sequential transmission. By the 18-hour mark the GRM entry had clawed its way back to second place, only three laps behind the lead. The Porsche struck trouble with a broken half-shaft, causing the car to pit for four laps. The GRM Monaro re-took the lead, despite the Monaro pitting at the same time as the Porsche to replace rear suspension bolts that had broken away from the chassis. When the Porsche returned to the track, Allan Grice, told to drive as fast as possible, hit the wall on the top of the mountain while attempting to lap the Mosler MT900R driven by Mark Pashley which broke the Porsche's rear suspension and took it out of contention. Upon its return to the track Darren Palmer put the car into the wall at Griffin's Bend with no steering, a legacy of the Grice crash. The Monaro, driven by Tander, Pretty, Steven Richards and Cameron McConville, ran in the lead for the last five hours to win the race by 24 laps from the British entered Mosler of Martin Short. In the race, Tander's fastest race lap of 2:14.3267 was actually quicker than Brad Jones' pole time of 2:15.0742.