Latest / Rusty's Garage / Andy McElrea (Part 2)

Transcript

Andy McElrea (Part 2) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:20
  G'day, it's Rusty here, all set for part two of my podcast with the owner of McElray Racing, Andy McElray.
• 0:27
  Before he began running his own operation and unearthing, developing and guiding some seriously impressive young racers, and talking to students, incidentally, about making good life choices, that is a compelling program that we'll cover a little bit later,
• 0:43
  Before all of that, he was behind the wheel himself.
• 0:46
  We cover his early years in Part 1, which is in the Garage Library right now.
• 0:51
  Give it a listen if you haven't already.
• 0:53
  From late-night pit stop practice in a caravan park to beating some impressive internationals in Formula Ford.
• 1:00
  Plus, a band of brothers from his school years that are tight to this day.
• 1:05
  Mates that made cars and racing their livelihood.
• 1:09
  We begin part two by talking about his success in Trans Am during an era when some big names raced these damn cool cars.
• 1:22
  After winning the 91 Formula 4 championship, Mark Pitch, who would feature in my career,
• 1:32
  down the line, he tried really hard to get me a drive in Formula Atlantic, like a proper drive, proper funding, et cetera, unlike 88, but wasn't successful even though he tried hard.
• 1:46
  So that was kind of – I thought that was my big break and it never came.
• 1:50
  So back to selling cars in Christchurch and –
• 1:56
  My girlfriend Mel and I went up to Auckland for the wedding of a friend called Craig Beard.
• 2:03
  And we were, after the, I was driving the wedding car, which I thought pretty brave actually, given some of my history.
• 2:10
  What was the wedding car?
• 2:11
  What was the wedding car?
• 2:12
  Mate, it was a BMW of some kind because Beardow was driving for Lyle at the time.
• 2:17
  But yeah, yeah.
• 2:19
  So we went to Craig and Lou's wedding and I got talking to Mark Petcher's wife, Bobby, who's still a very dear friend of ours.
• 2:28
  And...
• 2:29
  She asked, I'd now been selling cars in Christchurch without racing.
• 2:35
  I'd done a little bit of racing with my good mate, Nigel Barclay, in a Falcon V8 thing that he'd built up and did a couple of three-hour races, but that was all I'd done in a number of years.
• 2:47
  And Bobby said, would you move to Auckland, Andy?
• 2:50
  Would you consider moving to Auckland?
• 2:51
  I said, if I thought it could reignite my racing career, I would move in a heartbeat.
• 2:57
  Yeah.
• 2:57
  And so she had a word with Mark, and Mark had just taken over the auto news magazine at the time with other renowned journo, Alan Dick.
• 3:11
  They owned the magazine, so they offered me a job.
• 3:14
  So I...
• 3:15
  I was selling cars in Christchurch, so this might be the first my boss, Kevin O'Donnell, will hear of this story, but I went down to Morehouse Ave where I was selling cars.
• 3:25
  I was the only one working for the day.
• 3:28
  So you go down, you unlock the chain at the front, then you open all the cars up, put the flags on the aerials of the cars, and then you –
• 3:36
  You know, you sit in the office and wait for the ducks to land on the pond, as we used to say.
• 3:40
  So this particular day, I put all the flags on the aerials, locked the office, jumped in my car, headed to the airport, flew to Auckland, met Mark Petch and Alan Dick for lunch and a pseudo job interview at Auckland Airport.
• 3:57
  And then hopped back on the plane, flew back to Christchurch, drove back to the car yard about 4.30 and took the flags off the aerials and locked the gate and went home.
• 4:10
  And didn't sell many cars that day, but ended up getting a job working for Petchy and Alan Dick at Auto News in Auckland.
• 4:19
  So that was...
• 4:21
  That was like going to America in 88.
• 4:23
  That was the thing I needed to do just to break out of the rut.
• 4:26
  So Mel and I decided to move to Auckland.
• 4:29
  So that was April 94 and started working for the magazine and –
• 4:36
  As luck would have it, Petchy was moving.
• 4:39
  His star driver, who'd won a lot of championships with him, had moved on, Kane Scott, and he'd moved to a new team that was running Mustangs.
• 4:48
  So Petchy, he's a passionate man, and he was quite upset
• 4:54
  at the time, and so he gave Beato the drive in his Trans Am car.
• 5:01
  So he was going to move to Corv Camaros, and Beato had the drive.
• 5:06
  Beato was also contracted to BMW to race for Lyell in the Touring Car Championship.
• 5:11
  So that all was looking good, and as the season was sort of – they're starting to ramp up for the season, I think it started in –
• 5:21
  say, November and the car was ready like a month prior and a couple of weeks before the first test was due, Beardo found out that he wasn't going to be allowed to drive the Trans Am car.
• 5:35
  So Petchy had obviously offered me the job because he –
• 5:41
  liked me or respected me or whatever it may be.
• 5:44
  But then in this case, he had this brand new Trans Am Camaro that he was just finishing having built and no one to drive it.
• 5:52
  So, mate, here's me standing here.
• 5:55
  Johnny on the spot.
• 5:56
  Yep.
• 5:56
  Yep.
• 5:57
  Yep, it's better to be lucky than good sometimes.
• 6:01
  And so I was lucky and got to drive that car.
• 6:06
  And it was a real, really aggressive looking car and it was cool.
• 6:11
  So I obviously hadn't driven anywhere.
• 6:14
  I'd done the Wellington Street race with Ashley Stitchbury in one of Owen Evans' sliding direct cars.
• 6:22
  I'd done a couple of races with Nige and his Falcon in the South Island, but hadn't really sat in a race car since the 1991 Formula 4 championship.
• 6:29
  So, mate, I was as green as green and hopped in this Trans Am car at Bay Park.
• 6:35
  So...
• 6:37
  In Pecci's early career in touring cars, Pecci won the Australian Touring Car Championship with Robbie Fransovic in the Volvo back in the day, beat Jimmy Richards and Brock and everyone here.
• 6:50
  So him and Robbie have history and their mates go back a long way, but...
• 6:54
  For my debut in Trans Am racing, Robbie was driving for another team.
• 6:59
  And Robbie is a super aggressive driver, as anyone who has raced against him knows, because you don't win an Australian Touring Car Championship by being a Wally.
• 7:07
  So I had Kane Scott, who's I think five times champion, Robbie Franzevic and Kieran Wills and some other guys.
• 7:16
  And so, yeah, literally...
• 7:19
  Petchy threw me the keys, hopped in this thing, and what a weapon.
• 7:22
  My God.
• 7:23
  650 horsepower.
• 7:24
  I was used to 110.
• 7:27
  Then the cars are about twice the width of a Formula Ford.
• 7:29
  So we were at Bay Park, and I got the old usual, got the welcome to the club treatment from Robbie.
• 7:43
  I tried to pass him around the outside at the end of the back straight, he ran me into the weeds, ran me off the road, so I a lap later, took a couple laps to catch him, then I hit him up in the rear bumper and
• 7:59
  I sent him off and got by him and Kane had checked out.
• 8:04
  So I got second, I think, in my first race.
• 8:07
  And then Robbie came over and he wanted to kill me.
• 8:10
  And him and Petchy had a big blue.
• 8:12
  And I'm like, oh, my God, these two blokes are famous.
• 8:14
  They're a hell of a team.
• 8:16
  And here they are yelling at each other because of me.
• 8:18
  Anyway, when you get these chances, you've got to grab them with both hands.
• 8:22
  So it was just incredible, the noise.
• 8:27
  You know, you just, in a Formula Ford, you put your foot down and it goes, doesn't slide and does that.
• 8:32
  But in those Trans Am cars, man, oh, man, they were hairy beasts.
• 8:37
  And the only thing that was surprising about it was how –
• 8:42
  manageable they were to drive.
• 8:43
  They were seriously fast, a lot of grip, but still quite well behaved to handle.
• 8:49
  So it didn't take too long to get up to speed, and I was lucky enough to get second to Kane in the championship that first year.
• 8:57
  Hey, they were a cool-looking and sounding car.
• 9:00
  You've rattled off some legendary Kiwi or prominent Kiwi names there, mate, but this chapter involving Trans Am, there is, you know, an involvement as well from those on the other side of the ditch.
• 9:15
  So Peter Brock played, I think Dick and Steve Johnson, Kiwi hero Jimmy Richards as well.
• 9:21
  There's quite a cool yarn, I think, about you on the eve of,
• 9:25
  of a title win at the legendary Leo Leonard's place with Jimmy Richards.
• 9:30
  Is that right?
• 9:31
  The night before the deciding race maybe?
• 9:33
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.
• 9:35
  That's very true.
• 9:36
  So that's still one of my fondest racing memories actually.
• 9:40
  So what was happening at that stage, we were down to the last round of the Trans Am Championship.
• 9:45
  So there'd been Stevie Johnson, Ramos,
• 9:50
  Paul Gentilose, who was the American champion.
• 9:52
  Yeah.
• 9:53
  Jimmy Richards, who was obviously one of my heroes, being a Kiwi.
• 9:58
  Peter Brock, obviously, well, who, you know, everyone, you had to love Brockie because you couldn't not.
• 10:04
  And Kane Scott, the five-time champion.
• 10:05
  So there were all six of us won races that year.
• 10:10
  And it was kind of a bit like my Formula Ford year in that it was a really, really good year to do well because they were kind of standout years.
• 10:18
  And in Trans Am in New Zealand,
• 10:21
  The following years were probably as memorable.
• 10:24
  I'd gone off to America by that stage, but Drakey and Beardo started butting heads the years after I went away, and they were memorable for a lot of people.
• 10:33
  But I think my year was more memorable for the amount of guys that won races and sort of the caliber of guys we were able to race against, and the championship ended up going into the final round between Jimmy Richards and I were tied together
• 10:49
  on points going into the final round at Timaru, which was kind of my home track.
• 10:54
  And it was, we went, my good mate Mark Leonard, we were staying at his place.
• 11:05
  And when I was doing my apprenticeship in Ashburton, we would go down to Timaru for tech once a year as part of your apprenticeship.
• 11:13
  And I always stayed at Leo and Maureen Leonard's house in Timaru.
• 11:18
  So being family friends for as long as I can remember.
• 11:21
  So Mark said, should we go out and say hi to mum and dad?
• 11:26
  This was on the Friday night.
• 11:27
  So we'd had practice at the track and we were pretty quick, I think.
• 11:33
  And, um,
• 11:35
  We went out, so I said, yeah, that's a great idea.
• 11:38
  So we went out to Leo and Maureen's house and then we pull in the driveway and I go, oh, shit, there's Jimmy Richards' rental car.
• 11:47
  And I wasn't really thinking I wanted to catch up with him because I knew, you know, Gentleman Jim is such a load of crap.
• 11:58
  He is the most ruthless prick on track, but...
• 12:01
  Because he always, after he sent you off, he says sorry.
• 12:04
  I think that's where the gentleman part comes from.
• 12:06
  But he, you know, I just didn't want him nicking me in the head before the most important weekend of my life.
• 12:11
  So anyway, we bowled in and we went there.
• 12:13
  And Leo and Jim, who had some absolutely epic battles in the PDL Mustang.
• 12:21
  Yeah.
• 12:22
  And so they're good mates.
• 12:24
  And Jimmy, they were just having a quiet beer and a yarn.
• 12:26
  And Mark and I walked in and sat down and...
• 12:30
  Leo offered us a beer, we had a beer, and we sat down, and it was, for me, the most surreal situation to be sitting in a bloke's kitchen with two of New Zealand's best ever racing drivers, Leo Leonard and Jimmy Richards, and getting the chance to race against one of them the next day and just talking shit.
• 12:54
  He wasn't...
• 12:57
  anywhere near as cunning as I thought he would be.
• 13:00
  I think the fact that Jimmy and Faye have been mates with my mum and dad for a long time, I think maybe he wouldn't have been upset to see me do well on the championship, but I know that he would certainly want to win it.
• 13:12
  He would prefer he won it than me, but he said that, mate, you've done a really good job this year and if you don't do anything silly over the weekend, this will be your championship, so good luck.
• 13:23
  And he meant that genuinely.
• 13:26
  So that was really one of the coolest moments that I can remember racing, you know, knowing what Jimmy Richards, you know, 1996, he was still a very, very handy driver.
• 13:38
  And so it was cool.
• 13:40
  It was really, really cool.
• 13:41
  What a great, great tale, mate, and highlight underscore what a good bloke he is.
• 13:47
  I know he's tough on the track, but away in that sense.
• 13:49
  That's, as you say, very surreal.
• 13:52
  It meant that success between Formula Ford and now even Trans Am, you know, those titles are personal highlights for you, mate, but it also meant that your name was on a very special piece of silverware in New Zealand twice, the Jim Clark Trophy.
• 14:08
  That must rate pretty highly.
• 14:09
  Yeah.
• 14:09
  Well, it does.
• 14:11
  Like winning for the first, up until 1991, all I ever wanted to do was to win the Formula Four championship.
• 14:19
  And then winning that was an enormous weight off my shoulders because had I not got that opportunity, had Stephen Foster not given me that opportunity to win that championship, I think I would be...
• 14:33
  twice the size that I am now, car salesman in Christchurch with an exceptionally bad attitude and more chips on a shoulder that you could imagine because it meant so much to me to get an opportunity to race at a high level and do well at it.
• 14:49
  So that was the first massively significant moment for me.
• 14:55
  And then...
• 14:56
  Then I heard I got nominated for the Jim Clark Trophy, and I'm like, no way.
• 15:01
  That's reserved for guys like Kenny Smith and Paul Radisic and all those sorts of legends that have been before.
• 15:09
  So then to actually win that, man, that was something else, to be on that list.
• 15:17
  So then we won it for the Formula 4 Championship, and then –
• 15:23
  Um, again, five years later with the Trans Am Championship, winning gym trophy again.
• 15:28
  And it was, I actually had already moved to America when the prize giving ceremony was on.
• 15:34
  So, uh, by, that was mid-1996.
• 15:37
  So, um, Mel, my girlfriend at the time, went along and represent me in case we won it.
• 15:44
  And we did.
• 15:44
  Um,
• 15:45
  And there's another little chubby kid called Scott Dixon who won the Steel Trophy, which is kind of for the up-and-coming driver at the time.
• 15:53
  So there's a cool photo of Mel with my Jim Clark Trophy and Scott Dixon with the Steel Trophy.
• 16:00
  And then that was really neat.
• 16:03
  Yeah.
• 16:04
  It's not till now when I look back at that, the list of Jim Clark trophy winners.
• 16:10
  And at the time, we were only the first, the second guy to win it twice, I think, along with Brett Riley.
• 16:17
  And then obviously you've got Scott Dixon on there and Liam Lawson and these modern kids who are modern-day rock stars.
• 16:26
  And so I still don't really think my name...
• 16:31
  you know, matches up to a lot of those guys who went on to incredible international careers.
• 16:36
  But I'm still very, very proud to have won it twice.
• 16:42
  As you should be.
• 16:43
  You've gone on to build your own very successful race team, mate, with notable wins.
• 16:48
  And we'll get to some of that stuff here.
• 16:50
  But –
• 16:51
  There is a feeling among some of your peers that you absolutely, based on what we've just covered, could have continued on that professional race driver path if you had the backing.
• 17:01
  And I know lots of people do the old, you know, shoulda, coulda, woulda, and if I had this and so on.
• 17:08
  When did you draw the line in the sand, Andy, and go, you know, I'm not going to chase the professional driver thing and do other stuff?
• 17:21
  Okay, it wasn't hard because it got drawn for me, and I'll explain what I mean there.
• 17:26
  So in the first year in Trans Am and Tina, the Black Camaro, my teammate, Motorsport New Zealand, came up with an idea of having international drivers share a car with a local driver.
• 17:40
  So there'd be two local Trans Am rounds and then there'd be two international races per weekend for the international drivers.
• 17:45
  So that year there was –
• 17:49
  yeah there was Jimmy Dick Johnson Steve Millen came out and shared my car so Steve being an expat Kiwi very very successful sports car driver with Nissan driving the Cunningham Motorsport over there
• 18:04
  So we became mates and he, you know, when I met him, that was a bit of a fanboy moment because I got his autograph when he was racing Atlantic cars in the Smash Palace Roll to New Zealand back in the day.
• 18:16
  So, and, you know, that was the year before, driving with a hero and...
• 18:23
  That's when I realised that maybe we were going okay when we were only like a tenth or so.
• 18:28
  I think at one track, he was a tenth quicker than me.
• 18:31
  At another one, I was a tenth quicker than him.
• 18:33
  And then the third one, we were about the same.
• 18:34
  So that's when I thought, wow, okay, this is pretty neat.
• 18:39
  So we stayed in touch throughout 1996.
• 18:41
  And then as the 96 championship went on between Jimmy and I, he said, if you win this championship,
• 18:52
  come to America, I'll sponsor you for your green card, and I'll help you, I'll make some introductions, and we'll try and get you a drive in the States.
• 19:04
  So I thought, that's cool.
• 19:05
  And then he said, but you have to win the championship.
• 19:09
  So I'm like, all right, that's fine, no pressure.
• 19:12
  But...
• 19:14
  About that time as the championship was coming to a close, both Dick Johnson and Peter Brock separately said, hey, mate, you go okay.
• 19:23
  If you want to come to Australia, we'll help you get established.
• 19:26
  We'll make some introductions and sort of see what can happen.
• 19:28
  Now, if Steve Millen hadn't said or offered the opportunity to go to America,
• 19:35
  I would have grabbed those opportunities that Peter and Jim had sort of offered with both hands.
• 19:43
  And that would have been my wildest dreams coming true to get offered by guys of that caliber to come to Australia and that helped me get established.
• 19:51
  But I thought, well, hang on.
• 19:54
  those dudes are, you know, they're probably earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is, you know, serious amounts of money.
• 20:00
  But I knew that Steve Millen was earning millions of dollars in America.
• 20:04
  They're greenbacks, right?
• 20:07
  So I thought, no, I'll bite the bullet and I'll go to America where there's more opportunity.
• 20:14
  So...
• 20:16
  here's where I came unstuck.
• 20:17
  So Steve gave me the opportunity to run a department of his massively successful still in aftermarket auto parts outfit.
• 20:28
  Organisation, yeah.
• 20:29
  Yeah, organisation and the –
• 20:31
  The department I looked after, we did custom upgrades on Chevy Suburbans.
• 20:35
  So Chevy Suburbans were the quintessential Yank Tank SUV.
• 20:41
  They cost about $40,000 brand new.
• 20:43
  And he had a little division that was doing custom upgrades on them.
• 20:46
  So he said, right, you can come and you can, you've sold cars, you'll be able to do this.
• 20:51
  You just need to learn the terminology over here and you'll be fine.
• 20:55
  So that's what I did as I started selling upgrades on these Chevy Suburbans.
• 21:01
  What I did wrong was I did too good of a job of selling these upgrades.
• 21:06
  And then I got there in April 96.
• 21:10
  Mel came over.
• 21:11
  We got engaged.
• 21:13
  She went home to organise the wedding.
• 21:15
  Because at that stage I was going to go back and defend my Trans Am Championship.
• 21:20
  But Mel went home and then I was getting ready to go home and...
• 21:28
  for summer and for our wedding.
• 21:32
  And before I left, Steve said, called me into his office and said, hey, when you're away, have a think about what you want to do next year.
• 21:39
  I'm like, right.
• 21:39
  And he goes, if you want to go racing, you're on your own.
• 21:44
  You need to make your own arrangements.
• 21:46
  But if you want to grow up, learn about business, and actually start getting yourself established, you've got a job.
• 21:53
  So that's what I mean by the line was drawn in the sand for me.
• 21:58
  I was 30 years old when we left Auckland in 96.
• 22:00
  Yeah.
• 22:03
  I was 30 years old.
• 22:05
  By the time we sold our furniture, that paid off my credit card debt.
• 22:09
  So with all the racing I'd done in New Zealand, I was 30 years old and didn't have any debt but didn't have a cent to my name.
• 22:16
  So...
• 22:17
  I was quite happy with that because I'd achieved two things I never thought I would, plus the Jim Clark trophy.
• 22:22
  So Mel, being a very, very naive lass, she cashed up her superannuation and sold her cars.
• 22:31
  She funded our flights to America, the bond in our apartment in Newport Beach, and our little Honda Civic that we bought to drive around in.
• 22:39
  So she funded that journey over to the States and...
• 22:46
  So fast forward to the end of the year, she goes home to organise the wedding and Steve sort of gave me that ultimatum that you go racing on your own and I couldn't because he had sponsored me for my green card.
• 22:58
  That was going to be a five-year process.
• 23:00
  So he had me by the short and curlies, as they would say.
• 23:07
  And so that was my racing done pretty much that easily because I could come back to New Zealand or maybe go to Australia, but I'd lost the momentum.
• 23:18
  I hadn't taken Jimmy or Rocky up on their offers.
• 23:23
  I'd been away for a year.
• 23:25
  I wasn't going to be racing the Trans Am Championship again.
• 23:28
  So that was a complete change of direction in my life there and then.
• 23:34
  So it was an easy decision because it wasn't even a decision.
• 23:38
  It just had to happen.
• 23:43
  Firstly, we need to just say Mel is one of life's great human beings, mate.
• 23:48
  So what a sacrifice she made for that part of your life.
• 23:53
  your journey together.
• 23:54
  I reckon that's actually one of the first times I crossed paths with you was in Orange County in about 1998 around a champ car race as it would have been
• 24:02
  back then at California Speedway or Fontana.
• 24:06
  You stayed there for a number of years with that organization and did some great things.
• 24:11
  You reconnected with Timmy Miles and came back and worked in a company that he was playing a significant part in called Auto By Tell, which I think was a bit of a forerunner to car sales and car expert and things that we now consider.
• 24:26
  to be quite normal in the online automotive space.
• 24:30
  You did dabble in a race with Paul Morris as well, and then the Gold Coast beckoned.
• 24:36
  I think you raced for Paul at Bathurst, didn't you?
• 24:38
  You contested the 1,000.
• 24:39
  I wouldn't say contested, but, yeah, so, yeah, we came back at the end of just not long after September 11.
• 24:51
  We moved...
• 24:55
  Hunter was about to turn two.
• 24:57
  We'd ticked all the boxes we wanted to tick and literally we lived the American dream.
• 25:05
  The six years that we were there, we kind of got established.
• 25:09
  We bought our first car for Mitsubishi Montero SUV.
• 25:14
  So we thought we were very, very flash.
• 25:16
  We're having that.
• 25:17
  Then we bought our first home.
• 25:20
  Then we had a kid and then I bought myself a BMW 328i.
• 25:23
  So...
• 25:26
  all things that were sort of beyond our wildest dreams when we went there.
• 25:29
  We managed to achieve by actually focusing on work and business and trying to get established.
• 25:36
  So...
• 25:38
  At the time, I didn't have many options.
• 25:42
  I didn't have an option to go racing, so I grabbed it with both hands and ran with it and thoroughly enjoyed a new direction in life.
• 25:50
  But after we – there was a five-year plan to go to America and then we were looking for a sign, do we stay or do we go?
• 26:00
  And what I was doing, selling these upgrades on these Chevy Suburbans, when we got there –
• 26:07
  an average job was a $20,000 to $25,000 upgrade.
• 26:11
  After doing it for six years, I was selling sort of $120,000, $130,000 upgrades on these Chevy Suburbans.
• 26:18
  Wow.
• 26:18
  So we'd done quite a good job of that.
• 26:21
  And then...
• 26:22
  When we decided, what are we going to do?
• 26:25
  And then when September 11 happened, we thought, the economy's probably going to tank for a little while here.
• 26:31
  And my customers, who are probably 0.01% of the population, who can go and spend $120,000 on a $40,000 truck.
• 26:40
  So we thought it's time to move.
• 26:44
  But before I move on, when we met, that was you, Murph, and Steve Pizzati.
• 26:54
  Steve Pizzati, that's right.
• 26:54
  And you'd been back east to watch McConville do a barber dodge race, I think.
• 27:01
  Correct.
• 27:01
  That's the detail around that.
• 27:02
  Correct.
• 27:02
  And these blokes lobbed up and, yeah, and lobbed up and slept on the couch.
• 27:06
  That's the first time that we met and first time I met Steve Pizzati, who I worked with for many years later.
• 27:12
  So that was pretty – that was fun.
• 27:14
  We had a fun few days then.
• 27:16
  But then – so I was offered the job to work for the Giltrap Group back in New Zealand and running – I think it was running the Porsche importing part of their business.
• 27:32
  but by now I was earning quite good dollars in America and the exchange rate was still pretty solid against the New Zealand and couldn't really see ourselves moving back to New Zealand, so we looked at opportunities maybe in Melbourne.
• 27:45
  Never, ever considered the Gold Coast.
• 27:46
  Not once did we think about Queensland or the Gold Coast.
• 27:50
  And then Tim was with his auto-bitel business, which –
• 27:55
  It has to be said is the forerunner.
• 27:58
  It's when that business ran out of money because it didn't get traction quick enough, it's the only reason that we had to shut it down and it became car sales and look what a jug and all that is.
• 28:08
  But that was all Tim Miles' idea and concept.
• 28:13
  Um, so, you know, no wonder he went on to be an extremely successful businessman, but he offered me the job.
• 28:20
  He was restructuring autobytale.com.au at the time and offered me the job.
• 28:25
  He decided to do, um,
• 28:29
  to drop his marketing manager and his sales manager and kind of merge those roles into one for some bizarre reason.
• 28:35
  He thought I was going to be capable of doing that.
• 28:37
  So I went, righto.
• 28:38
  Yeah, that sounds good.
• 28:40
  He offered me a good salary and a good redundancy package if we couldn't rescue it in time.
• 28:46
  And then on my first trip as national sales manager, I went to Brisbane and stayed with Beardo at...
• 28:54
  at Hope Island.
• 28:55
  We really loved Orange County in Southern California, the lifestyle and the climate and so forth, and just the general attitude of the people.
• 29:05
  And Sydney was pretty hectic for us.
• 29:10
  Couldn't really find our feet in Sydney.
• 29:13
  I went up and stayed with Craig and Lou at...
• 29:18
  on one of my, on my first trip to Queensland and went back to Sydney and said to Mel, my God, you're not going to believe there's actually an Orange County in Australia and would you believe it's the Gold Coast?
• 29:28
  So we just immediately, so a couple of months later, Tim and I made the decision to shut AutoBitel down.
• 29:37
  So I took my redundancy package.
• 29:40
  We drove to Queensland and the very next day, I did my first day working at Porsche Sport Driving School.
• 29:47
  So my first day in Queensland as a resident was working with Thomas at Porsche.
• 29:52
  Which you still do now, mate, don't you?
• 29:55
  Still doing it, mate.
• 29:56
  I was there last weekend.
• 30:08
  Here's a quick pronunciation survey for you all.
• 30:11
  Porsche or Porsche, Peugeot or Peugeot, Rusty's Garage or the best podcast on the planet.
• 30:20
  Whichever you use, don't worry too much about it.
• 30:23
  People will know what you mean.
• 30:24
  Can we just touch on the 2006 Great Race for a moment?
• 30:28
  It's a tough one for you in that
• 30:32
  Kiwi family to remember for all sorts of reasons.
• 30:34
  The passing of Mark Porter in the second tier development series, a huge crash for Paul Radisic.
• 30:42
  Between you and I think Paul Cruikshank, you were kind of the immediate family calls were to you guys, weren't they?
• 30:50
  Yeah.
• 30:51
  Yeah, yeah, that was really a really weird weekend.
• 30:58
  So Mark's best buddy, Nick Barnsdell, was running the Hyundai business with Mark over here.
• 31:09
  And the week before...
• 31:13
  Mark's accident, we'd had a barbecue together, families, the weekend before.
• 31:21
  Mark was playing soccer with Hunter out in front of our house.
• 31:26
  Hunter was six years old at the time.
• 31:28
  So we saw a lot of those guys, and at the time, and you'll remember this too, we had a really –
• 31:36
  extraordinarily cool social group going, led by the one and only Daryl Beattie and their place was Party Central.
• 31:46
  As you well remember on many occasions with, with Daryl and Simon Crafer and the Beardos and the Radisiches and the Porters and ourselves and you guys and,
• 31:56
  You know, we had some amazing weekends and it was a really, really good bunch of guys, you know, occasionally the Ingalls and Stevie Johnson and co. And Mark's crash at Bathurst was kind of the beginning of the end of that whole thing sort of falling apart.
• 32:16
  It changed us all because...
• 32:19
  were first time I had experienced the loss of someone from the sport that we live and breathe and love so much.
• 32:30
  And it was really sobering.
• 32:34
  But there wasn't one moment where I thought that we wouldn't continue with it one way or the other.
• 32:41
  And
• 32:42
  And on a personal note, you know, when Hunter decided he wanted to race and race single seaters, which are, you know, potentially a little bit more dangerous than saloon cars, Mel and I had the discussion and I said, you know, you know what the sport can do if things go wrong and we need to be on the same page.
• 33:00
  If we're going to support Hunter racing, we need to, you know, be together on this because if something went bad, we don't need it causing problems.
• 33:12
  You know, that had probably the benefit.
• 33:16
  Mark's accident gave me the opportunity to have a discussion that otherwise would have been probably difficult to have with my wife.
• 33:23
  But over that weekend, it became apparent that when Mark went to, was helicoptered off to the hospital in Sydney, he was not in a good way and Nick, you know,
• 33:39
  went, Nick, his two IC, went with him to the hospital and we were sort of checking in what's happening.
• 33:46
  And, you know, at that time you're just hoping and hoping that the news is going to be somewhat positive.
• 33:51
  But Nick was a really, really, absolutely rocked throughout that and he was absolutely honest with us the whole way through and we knew that...
• 34:00
  It was bad.
• 34:01
  And then how we were going to, or how he was going to tell Adrian, Mark's wife.
• 34:10
  So all the, you know, over the weekend, knowing that Mark was gone, it was the Peter Brock Memorial weekend of Bathurst.
• 34:21
  It was quite bizarre.
• 34:22
  And the worst thing was on the Sunday night, you know, Mark and Nick did a really good job of
• 34:29
  of commercialising their spend on his racing and always had a hospitality suite and guests and so forth.
• 34:37
  at all the big V8 races, especially when he was in the main game in the Enduros.
• 34:42
  And so they, you know, went about business as usual and all the guests came and, you know, it blew me away that they all came and were on the booze and having a great day.
• 34:53
  And it's probably a good thing in one respect, but it was really strange that on the Sunday they all, we packed up Paul's V8s and our Porsches and then we went over
• 35:08
  broke down their hospitality suite, all their he and they signage with Mark on the banners and all that sort of stuff.
• 35:15
  And we knew by then that he was gone and it was just the most hollow, weird, empty feeling, packing up your mate's stuff after he's just passed away.
• 35:29
  It was very, very strange.
• 35:32
  You guys collectively then I think went and visited Paul Radisic in hospital before you sort of left town as well.
• 35:40
  At that point was the reality of Mark's loss, did that ever make you think that that's it, I'm out of racing, I'm done, or did you, you know, because he loved it so much he went perhaps the other way?
• 35:57
  I think the latter comment, I think,
• 36:00
  You know, race, I remember my dad lost a really close mate when I was two or three years old, a guy called Brent Hawes that had a brake failure at Ruapuna in a sports car back in the day.
• 36:12
  And I knew growing up that dad had lost a mate and then –
• 36:17
  extraordinarily his car was a yellow and black car and the number was 111 and is the same as Mark's car is yellow black 111 but so you know I knew that that that it was a possibility um when you're racing yourself you never think you're going to get injured but that weekend was just so weird when when Paul had that shunt um coming out of the chase and had to hit on with the with the earth bank and that car was in a bad way it was
• 36:46
  I, another really good mate of ours, Paul Sepronich, was running that car, that Sepi with the Team Kiwi car.
• 36:55
  His phone was off.
• 36:56
  Patricia Radisic was trying to get hold of Paul.
• 36:59
  And then because of that big social group that was very strong, at the time, Patricia rang me because she knew I was there.
• 37:07
  And...
• 37:09
  wanted some answers on what the hell was going on, and I didn't know.
• 37:14
  So I ran over to the medical centre with her on the phone, and Paul was already in there and just wanted to know that he was okay, which he was, which I was able to tell Patricia, and she was very stoic throughout the whole thing, and then...
• 37:32
  you know, obviously relieved that he was going to be okay.
• 37:34
  He obviously had some pretty bad injuries, which lasted for a long time for him.
• 37:39
  But, yeah, it was, you know, it was only a month before, you know, Porter, Radicic, myself, Beardos, all of us lunatics had been at Mark's...
• 37:52
  I think it was his 30th birthday, and had a really good night.
• 37:56
  And then Margaret had his crash, and then in the big race, Paul's had his crash.
• 38:00
  And I'm like, what on earth is going on here?
• 38:02
  It's a bit like watching the second plane hit the Twin Towers.
• 38:06
  It's like, man, when's this going to stop?
• 38:08
  It's just, it was horrendous.
• 38:10
  But it never...
• 38:13
  never made me consider my involvement with racing.
• 38:16
  We all do it because we love it, and those guys I don't think would have stopped in the same situation.
• 38:23
  Well, Paul was focused and working on his own supercars team.
• 38:30
  You had worked on the Porsche side of the operation for him.
• 38:35
  And as everyone sort of fired out of the GFC, mate, you more or less have the genesis to create what is now known as McElroy Racing.
• 38:45
  Where was the moment where you thought, I'm going to do this, you know,
• 38:50
  how gung-ho were you about it?
• 38:53
  Give us a sense of that.
• 38:54
  Yeah.
• 38:55
  So I had one of the businesses that I'd started, one of the many businesses I'd started when I moved to the Gold Coast, was importing timber furniture from Vietnam.
• 39:07
  And that was one of the few that actually was going quite well.
• 39:11
  So the shop that's now our race shop was a warehouse shop
• 39:18
  distribution centre initially and when, as you say, with the GFC and things getting tight and Paul wound down his race team, so I decided I'll buy the Porsche equipment from him and move over to move into my own factory and by this stage I'd got to know
• 39:42
  the famous Warren Luff pretty well and realised what a quality bloke he was and thought, well, I can start, I might as well start my own team.
• 39:51
  Paul and I had run the Porsche side of his business for five or six years quite successfully, so I figured there's no reason why I can't do it again.
• 39:58
  And Luffy just seemed like a real creditable guy to do it with.
• 40:01
  So...
• 40:03
  We got a deal together.
• 40:04
  As you say, I was pretty gung-ho.
• 40:08
  Steve Webb, who I'd run Jonathan for three years in Carrera Cup when we were at PCR, and Steve was very generous and offered us the lease of Jono's old car for Luffy to drive.
• 40:25
  I needed to find the budget for it, and we had a young kid called Nathan Karati from WA who had signed up to drive the other car, and we were just running a little baby Carrera Cup team out of our furniture warehouse.
• 40:39
  And then, lo and behold, about a couple of months before the championship was about to start, the Sharon Racing Group or company that had taken over Carrera Cup,
• 40:54
  fell on some hard times and then it got announced that Career Cup wasn't going to run after having run for six or seven years in Australia.
• 41:02
  It wasn't going to happen.
• 41:03
  So I'm like, oh, that's charming.
• 41:05
  I'm...
• 41:06
  I'm all dressed up here, I've got nowhere to go.
• 41:09
  So literally that same day, it was in the media, and then my phone rang, and Ross Stone called me and said, oh, here, Carrera Cup is off.
• 41:19
  And I said, yeah, it is, Ross.
• 41:21
  And he goes, what are your plans now?
• 41:23
  And I said, I got none.
• 41:26
  Fortunately, I had my furniture business still going, but I was really keen on having my own race team and doing something special there.
• 41:36
  He said, well, I've got a kid called Daniel Gaunt from New Zealand.
• 41:41
  He seems to have a sponsor.
• 41:42
  I've got a Falcon and an engine and a spare drive shaft here.
• 41:47
  If you want to try and put something together, let me know.
• 41:52
  Have a think about it and let me know.
• 41:53
  And I said, thought about it, want to do it.
• 41:55
  When can I come and see you?
• 41:57
  And he said, oh, now.
• 41:59
  So he's just on the other side of the motorway from my shop.
• 42:02
  So I bowled straight over there.
• 42:04
  And he ran me through all the detail and we sort of put together the structure of we would lease the car, lease the engine or engines.
• 42:15
  They would help us out with the spare parts because every car was different back in those days.
• 42:20
  And then we got Nathan Leach, who was one of the engineers.
• 42:25
  as our race engineer and just paid him on a contract basis.
• 42:28
  So within 24 hours, we had a deal done with Dan Gaunt and Michael Morton, the Mad Butcher in New Zealand.
• 42:36
  And so we went DVS racing instead, which is now Super 2, of course.
• 42:40
  And yeah, it was way, way bigger step than I wanted to take for my first year as a race team, but it worked out okay.
• 42:50
  Now, though, McElroy Racing has experience with GT cars, success at Bathurst 12-hour, and significantly, Andy, in Porsche Carrera Cup and Sprint Challenge.
• 43:01
  Although the supercars was at the very beginning of it all, you've more or less stayed in this lane since, haven't you?
• 43:10
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 43:11
  I...
• 43:13
  I just wanted to have a Porsche team, and I liked the way that Porsche do things, the factory support and everything about it.
• 43:21
  So it made sense to me, especially having done that first year in Super 2 and how difficult it was for parts supply and all that sort of stuff.
• 43:32
  So I wanted to have a Porsche team, and it was...
• 43:40
  What I did was I wanted to have winning cars from the start.
• 43:45
  And to do that, I had to put a fair bit of skin in the game myself.
• 43:51
  So the first year, which we were back, was 2011 with Johnny Reid.
• 43:57
  He had some support from the Giltrap Group, and we put a deal together, and we were on pole at the first race at the Grand Prix.
• 44:05
  So that was sort of our...
• 44:07
  Yeah, Career Cup debut was on pole.
• 44:10
  We got fuel surge in the last corner of the last lap and didn't win the race, unfortunately.
• 44:16
  But it was the start.
• 44:18
  And then, you know, the next year we ran Alex Davison.
• 44:21
  Again, I sort of underwrote that.
• 44:24
  So...
• 44:25
  To make a long story short, I took some absolutely ridiculous financial risks in the early years because I wanted to win races with guys like Johnny Reed and Alex Davison and Warren Luff.
• 44:38
  And now looking back –
• 44:41
  I probably looked like quite a wise man, but five, six years ago, I was far from a wise man.
• 44:49
  I had enormous debt that I'd generated by, you know, funding, buying my own cars, putting these guys in them and, you know, having huge deficits between what it cost and what we bought in.
• 45:03
  But it –
• 45:06
  Now, looking back, I can say it was worthwhile because it got us established and now we've had some success and, you know, we're the only team that's won races in every year of Carrera Cup since 2011 and things like that.
• 45:20
  So, yeah, we look quite clever now, but we didn't a few years back.
• 45:27
  And you have stability on your side.
• 45:28
  So Warren Luff plays a really important role with the organisation.
• 45:31
  You've got guys like Lee Guyer that are in there as well.
• 45:35
  Warren's been on the podcast and talked about his experience with you guys.
• 45:40
  I want to, if I can, shine a light on some really cool successes that have come out of McElroy Racing.
• 45:48
  Firstly, Matt Campbell, humble Aussie.
• 45:51
  with your help, has gone on to race for Porsche globally.
• 45:57
  What were your first impressions of this youngster and how did you stitch it all together?
• 46:02
  Well, the first I met, the first time I met Matt was at the Bathurst 12-hour with his granddad, Bill.
• 46:07
  And a lot of people in Queensland will know Bill as the president of the Warwick District Sporting Car Club, which runs Morgan Park.
• 46:14
  And Bill was a grumpy old bugger, but a lovely man.
• 46:19
  When he, you know, we would talk to him about hiring the circuit at Morgan Park for testing and things like that.
• 46:26
  And then when he started being nice to me, that's when I got suspicious.
• 46:29
  So he was nice to me when he brought his grandson Matt over to meet us behind the pits at Bathurst for the 12-hour.
• 46:38
  And this kid was...
• 46:41
  the shyest person I've ever met and he was looking at the ground and I'd you know like always try and engage the kids when I meet them for the first time and find out where they're at and and you know get a feel for their personality and things like that and he was so incredibly shy it was it was amazing and and but Bill said the kids the kids got something special and
• 47:03
  Paul Stokel, who's a local guy up here and does driver training and things like that, he insisted that Matt had something special and Bill Grandad agreed and I was, okay, well, let's see if he does.
• 47:17
  And so we took him for a test at Queensland Raceway and he didn't hop in the car and break the lap record on the second lap, but what he did was listened and put everything that we asked him to do into practice.
• 47:31
  And by the end of the first day, he was doing a really, really good job.
• 47:37
  And it was obvious that, you know, this kid was good.
• 47:42
  Whether he was going to win the Bathurst 12-hour in five years' time or Le Mans was probably wasn't that clear just yet, but it was obvious what he was capable of.
• 47:54
  And then we did the first year of...
• 47:56
  of Porsche Michelin Sprint Challenge with him in a B-class car.
• 48:01
  And...
• 48:02
  You know, money was tight and his mum and granddad Bill were putting everything they could into it.
• 48:09
  But, you know, guys like Michael Hovey, Tim Miles, Scott Taylor, Grant Sparks, all his teammates at the time were buying tyres for him to get him, you know, for the next round and, you know, helping pay a part of the car lease and all those sorts of things to get him through.
• 48:26
  And so...
• 48:27
  We got to the end of the first year, or got to the fifth round of that year in 2014, and Michael Hovey was one of his teammates, and he couldn't do the final round at Phillip Island.
• 48:39
  So we put, Michael offered Matt to drive the car for no charge, and then the fee would be the same for our services.
• 48:49
  So I put together, I've still got on my laptop, the agreement that I wrote up between Bill Campbell and Michael Hovey for the lease of the car and what would happen if it blew up or Matt crashed it and all those sorts of things because I never wanted to always sort of been a little bit anal about making sure that we had our backside covered in the event something, a worst-case scenario happened.
• 49:09
  It didn't, but Matt, that's where it became really obvious that the kid was special and that...
• 49:17
  After he qualified on pole, I think, by 1.8 seconds ahead of Fraser Ross and Michael Armand and John McCorkendale, who are all front runners, race winners in that championship in the A class.
• 49:28
  Matt had been in B class.
• 49:30
  And then so he was on pole by 1.8 seconds, I think, and then won each race by 10 or 12 seconds.
• 49:37
  And after the race, he hopped out of the car.
• 49:42
  I went over and went to talk to Bill.
• 49:46
  about the problem we obviously now had because there's no way that he was going to race Sprint Challenge next year.
• 49:52
  That was an utter waste of time because he hadn't done much wheel-to-wheel racing despite a couple of seasons of Formula Ford.
• 50:00
  But Bill and I looked at each other and we didn't even say a word.
• 50:03
  We both knew that.
• 50:05
  that we had a problem because Matt needed to do Career Cup next year and there was no money.
• 50:11
  So I'd heard of these equity programs where you could sell shares like what had happened with Scotty Dixon back in the old days.
• 50:21
  I think Will Power and Will Davison and these dudes have done these programs.
• 50:25
  So I got together with Grant Sparks to work at how we could raise enough money to cover a couple of seasons of Career Cup for Matt with our team.
• 50:36
  We, Michael Hovey was the first to buy a couple of shares and Matt's mum and grandad put some money in, loaned some money.
• 50:43
  We started Matt Campbell Racing and a unit trust to distribute the equity once he was making money.
• 50:50
  He...
• 50:54
  We took – it was hard work selling the shares until a guy called Anthony Davidson, Anthony Gilbertson, who became a good customer of ours a couple of years later.
• 51:06
  But Anthony bought a couple of shares, and that was the impetus to –
• 51:13
  create demand and all of a sudden we we sold the first half were really difficult to sell then we sold the last half really easily and that covered his um his racing for two years in career cup um and now looking you know that all those shareholders now get a return on their money every year and um it's a it's a pretty cool story how
• 51:36
  you know, we managed to fund him from not having any money through to what he's doing now in Europe.
• 51:44
  And he also has a pretty exciting future ahead of him too.
• 51:49
  Most definitely.
• 51:50
  And to see him walking with that confidence now as a,
• 51:53
  as a Porsche driver compared to the kid that was looking at his feet and unable to talk to you, just the growth in him as a human being.
• 52:01
  You have become, mate, I think a journo, might have been Matt Koch from Speed Cafe, kind of talked about you being a little bit like a Porsche whisperer because you've done a very similar thing
• 52:14
  with Jackson Evans, right?
• 52:15
  And this brings together your family, your schoolmateship with Johnny Evans.
• 52:21
  Jackson's under your wing.
• 52:23
  You guide him on a similar path.
• 52:26
  They strike me as different people, but you've been able to do a similar thing with Jackson.
• 52:32
  Amazing, mate.
• 52:32
  Amazing.
• 52:33
  Yeah, Jackson and Matt were very, very different kids when they first came to us, probably quite similar when they left us.
• 52:40
  But, yeah, I didn't know Matt from a bar of soap when I met him.
• 52:44
  I've known Jackson since he was a baby, being family friends.
• 52:49
  So very, very different backgrounds to those relationships.
• 52:53
  But...
• 52:55
  we've managed to sort of get the best out of those kids.
• 52:58
  And what we've tried to do is not just how they drive the car and how they apply the throttle and apply the brake, but what they do outside of the car and how they interact with other people.
• 53:08
  And, you know, when they have a bad day picking them up and when they might be getting a little ahead of themselves, perhaps, you know, just calming them back down again and, you know,
• 53:18
  You know, one, we've had a similar journey with Cooper Murray, who came to us and started winning races quite quickly.
• 53:27
  And then, you know, he was a victim of last year's COVID, the initial COVID outbreak in Melbourne.
• 53:35
  And then...
• 53:36
  But we've now got him to a point where he's heading off to the shootout at the end of this month.
• 53:41
  And now we've got another four really, really hot kids coming through with Harry Jones, Jackson Walls, Christian Pancioni and Bailey Hall too.
• 53:50
  So there's four more really real hot shots in the pipeline as well.
• 53:56
  So it's pretty neat.
• 53:57
  And we're only there because of what...
• 54:00
  Matt and Jackson did and proved that the way we taught these kids is something that the Porsche factory seemed to like.
• 54:09
  Yeah.
• 54:10
  Couple to finish if we can, Andy.
• 54:12
  Firstly, to your son, Hunter.
• 54:14
  He lives and breathes.
• 54:15
  It has done since he was a little tacker.
• 54:18
  You sent him off.
• 54:19
  to your rival in Mick Ritter at Sonic in recent years to do the kind of school of motor racing.
• 54:25
  He succeeded in Formula Ford, you know, under Mick's umbrella there.
• 54:32
  He's now in the States, Hunter.
• 54:34
  How stressful is that as a dad?
• 54:36
  How satisfying is it?
• 54:38
  What are the next steps for him in his career?
• 54:41
  He's been up in the States for three years now and that's all off the back of...
• 54:46
  winning the Formula 4 championship here in 18 and getting the ticket to the Road to Indy scholarship shootout in Arizona at the end of 2018, which he was lucky enough to win that.
• 54:59
  And that sort of got him on this Road to Indy path.
• 55:01
  So he's just completed his third year, just finished third in the Indy Pro 2000
• 55:11
  championship.
• 55:13
  And a couple of weeks ago, I had something that you really only dream of, and that was the boss of Andretti Autosport from the US rang me and said they wanted to test him in their Indy Lights car.
• 55:28
  So that's really the culmination of the effort that Hunter's put in, that the PABST team have put into him over the last three years.
• 55:41
  and his backers and sponsors who, you know, obviously none of us can do what we do without those guys, but the ones that have hopped on board and helped him out, one of the things I guess that I will take the credit for with him, not the driving bit, but having him appreciate and recognise the financial support that he gets from these people, which –
• 56:07
  that tends to grow and snowball and then, you know, the support comes greater and then things like the test that just finished a few hours ago actually at Indianapolis conclude.
• 56:21
  So, yeah,
• 56:23
  How'd it go?
• 56:23
  Yeah, exceptionally good.
• 56:26
  They had six sessions over two days.
• 56:29
  So this is Indy Lights, right?
• 56:30
  So these things are monsters.
• 56:32
  They're doing 175 mile an hour down the front straight at Indianapolis on the road course going the opposite direction.
• 56:43
  They are weapons.
• 56:44
  They pop and bang and carry on and overrun with the turbo and they are absolute weapons.
• 56:49
  And here's your young bloke doing it, mate, at one of the greatest places ever.
• 56:52
  Yeah, quite surreal that they wanted to test him.
• 56:57
  And then so he actually, top of the six sessions, he was quickest in the fifth session overnight last night and then has finished up third quickest for the whole weekend.
• 57:08
  So, yeah, pretty outstanding, really.
• 57:11
  So very proud of what he's done there.
• 57:14
  And hopefully we can stitch something together for next year off the back of it.
• 57:19
  We hope so too.
• 57:20
  At the beginning of this podcast, Andy, and it's filtered through a couple of times during our chat here, we talked about some funny moments off track, you know, in the campground at Timaru and so on.
• 57:31
  And for all that chaos and fun of the era, I love how you have brought together –
• 57:42
  some people with stories to tell for the benefit of young people heading into life now and how they can make good life choices.
• 57:52
  And Warren Luff has been a guest recently on the podcast, and he talked about No Second Chance or N2C, which listeners can go and Google and find.
• 58:02
  And I would thoroughly, thoroughly recommend you try and encourage your school, if possible, to get these guys along for a chat.
• 58:11
  What is the genesis of that?
• 58:12
  What made you think about it?
• 58:14
  And it brings together some compelling stories that hopefully leave a good percentage of the room thinking about why they should make good choices in life, Andy.
• 58:27
  Yeah, so the No Second Chance program is something that I came up with the idea 10 years ago, and it started from a family friend called Paul Stanley.
• 58:40
  His son was bashed and killed at a party in Brisbane in 2006, and he has been speaking to school kids up and down the coast of Queensland for –
• 58:57
  for that time, since the end of 2006, he's been talking to kids about making smart decisions.
• 59:06
  His and my paths crossed in 2012, and Hunter was a 12-year-old kid driving a go-kart from time to time, so he thought we'd take Hunter along with his go-kart to one of his talks and...
• 59:24
  use him as an example of chasing your dreams and staying focused on your goals.
• 59:29
  So he did that and he used Hunter, a little kid with a go-kart, as the example.
• 59:36
  And it got me thinking about doing something –
• 59:40
  similar but bigger.
• 59:42
  And so Paul's story is about street violence, you know, staying safe, getting yourself out of trouble if you're in trouble, not getting into fights, all those sorts of things.
• 59:54
  Shortly after...
• 59:56
  we went to that presentation of Paul's, I met a guy called Matt Speakman.
• 1:00:00
  So Matt is another inspirational dude.
• 1:00:03
  He's a disabled athlete.
• 1:00:05
  He was paralysed by a drunk driver in Sydney many years ago, and he is very articulate.
• 1:00:12
  He is an incredible bloke.
• 1:00:15
  He's done the Sydney Hobart with a fully disabled crew.
• 1:00:19
  He's been in the Paralympics, just an absolute go-getter.
• 1:00:25
  with our help, the first paraplegic guy to race in a Porsche Championship anywhere in the world back in 2013 and ironically in the very same car that Matt Campbell did his first year of Sprint Challenge.
• 1:00:41
  And I knew Luffy and I knew Luffy's history with road safety and he's an iconic guy and someone that kids can relate to.
• 1:00:50
  Slowly the idea came together that maybe I could do something where we talk about the street violence and making smart decisions.
• 1:00:58
  Angle from Paul, the road safety angle from Matt having been paralysed by a drunk driver and Warren's history with road safety.
• 1:01:07
  Bring all them together and then go national, not just around Queensland.
• 1:01:10
  So three messages.
• 1:01:13
  road safety, street violence, and Luffy's message being making smart decisions.
• 1:01:18
  And the message that we get to these kids, they hear the three very, or two very harrowing stories that get most of the kids in tears about what happened to Paul, dropping his kid off at a party, going and picking him up two hours later, lying in a pool of blood.
• 1:01:38
  going to the hospital, switching the life support off, listening to him suffocate to death, things like that, which really resonate with the kids because it's not a video, it's not an actor, it's a dad that went through that.
• 1:01:50
  So that really gets through to the kids.
• 1:01:52
  Then Matt tells a very similar story about what happened to him in waking up in hospital, realising he's now a paraplegic life has changed.
• 1:02:03
  that really resonates with kids on a road safety level.
• 1:02:07
  And then Warren talks about making smart decisions.
• 1:02:09
  Harry's a little boy, eight years old, watching the Bathurst 1000 with his dad and making the decision that he wanted to be in that race and the sacrifice and smart decisions he had to make along the way to make sure that he got to where he wanted to be and to live his life goal.
• 1:02:23
  So we've been doing that now for nine years.
• 1:02:29
  We've spoken to over 20,000 kids.
• 1:02:32
  We've had feedback from parents thanking us for their son coming home after school today and giving mum or dad a hug, telling them that they love him and this is why and how things can change really quickly when you don't make smart decisions.
• 1:02:52
  So, yeah, it's been amazing.
• 1:02:55
  It's been something, again, when times were tough financially, I wondered why we were doing this.
• 1:02:59
  But when you get the feedback from the kids and the schools and the parents about how much their kid has changed their views, it makes you realise you've got to keep pushing on a bit longer.
• 1:03:11
  That's definitely well done, mate.
• 1:03:12
  Great stuff.
• 1:03:13
  I knew two hours wasn't ever going to be enough for this chat.
• 1:03:16
  There's a lot more we can cover.
• 1:03:18
  Congratulations on the successes of both Matt Campbell and Jackson Evans, the youngsters that are in the pipeline and even those that I know in the marketplace that want to come and be with us.
• 1:03:29
  McIlroy Racing and what they offer.
• 1:03:32
  I love the fact that when the world's a bit more open and time permits, you still enjoy racing your Formula Ford in New Zealand.
• 1:03:38
  And don't mind taking your old mate, Tim Miles, off the track when that happens too.
• 1:03:46
  Thank you so much for the chat.
• 1:03:48
  And we wish you and Emma continued success, mate.
• 1:03:52
  Well done on what you've achieved so far.
• 1:03:53
  Really appreciate it, Rusty.
• 1:03:54
  And thanks for having me on the show, mate.
• 1:04:01
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 1:04:05
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 1:04:09
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 1:04:18
  Listener.