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The Motorsport Brief | Wolfsport’s Tom Clarke · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:04
  On this edition of The Shortcast, we're focused on the business side of the sport with a new platform developed in our corner of the world for the benefit of both event management and participants that has the potential to go global.
• 0:18
  G'day everyone, Rusty here.
• 0:19
  Shortly to Tom Clark, who you may know from the Australian Rally Championship, where he's both competitor in various cars, including a seriously cool Datsun Stanza that went over the ditch recently to contest the Otago Rally in New Zealand.
• 0:33
  And he's been a passionate supporter of Production Cup as well through his businesses, which we'll get to.
• 0:39
  Little mention of a couple of recent eps that you might enjoy, including the re-release of Jeremy Burgess, the legendary Aussie crew chief who worked with Mick Doohan, Valentino Rossi and many more.
• 0:51
  We had some messages from listeners asking to kind of get him on or perhaps not realising he was actually already in our library.
• 0:58
  Recorded back in 2018, there is some awesome convo in there, including Mick's acute feeling with those awesome 500cc machines and how together they made the Honda the bike to beat.
• 1:12
  Plus, working with Valentino Rossi, keeping the band together when they went to Yamaha and Ducati, along with his recollections of a flashpoint at Laguna Seca in the Rossi-Casey Stoner rivalry.
• 1:24
  You can find that now, again, but it's back now.
• 1:27
  at the top of our library list this time.
• 1:30
  There's also a two-part feature with a familiar face of the circuit racing paddock, Trevor Schumach, who's been kind of the Michelin man for decades.
• 1:38
  His work overseas with the likes of Malcolm Osler in single-seaters, the connection he's had with Neil Crompton, plus the security around special tyres, racing Super Tourers and then owning one years later, as well as an unusual bit of eye-catching rally kit.
• 1:58
  that he now drives.
• 1:59
  You'll enjoy that.
• 1:59
  It is a rubber eater.
• 2:00
  Let's just say that much.
• 2:02
  Let's get to our guest and how a cutting edge system that he's behind is helping to streamline processes for all sorts of events and motorsport disciplines.
• 2:13
  Hello, Tom Clark.
• 2:14
  Welcome to the garage, mate.
• 2:15
  G'day, mate.
• 2:15
  How are you?
• 2:16
  I'm fantastic.
• 2:17
  Can we begin this conversation by maybe establishing credentials on both sides of the ledger from a competition standpoint and then maybe a business standpoint?
• 2:26
  Firstly, your rallying career commences, I think, back in 2009.
• 2:31
  You scraped together, like most good stories, a few thousand dollars.
• 2:35
  You buy a dream car and off you go.
• 2:38
  But sadly, mate, you were given a bit of inspiration, I guess you could say, from your late mum, weren't you?
• 2:43
  Yeah, yeah.
• 2:44
  Look, I think like any motorsport fan or fanatic that wants to get into motorsport, you sort of make all measures to get there, right?
• 2:52
  And I wasn't any different.
• 2:54
  I grew up in a family that, look, we did okay as a family, but there was never money there to get into motorsport.
• 3:01
  And not that my family didn't want me to get into motorsport, but it just wasn't a
• 3:04
  a fair and reasonable option when it comes to funding.
• 3:07
  So I left home at the age of 18 and moved to Sydney from a little spot on the south coast, New South Wales.
• 3:15
  And the bug got too much.
• 3:17
  I kept going to events and watching.
• 3:19
  I'm like, no, I've got to have a go at this.
• 3:21
  I really want to give this a go.
• 3:22
  So I think I sold a car and bit some pieces of what I had, some surfboards.
• 3:28
  I think I nudged together about $5,000 and went on a road trip with a good mate of mine that was
• 3:34
  We slept on the side of the road and the next morning I went and bought my first Datsun 1600 rally car.
• 3:40
  Amazing.
• 3:41
  There's some cool statistics along the way for you, stepping into four-wheel drive machinery in 2015, finishing second in the ARC to Nathan Quinn, I think a couple of years later.
• 3:54
  The progression, there's a bit of time in that, Tom, but the progression seems rapid.
• 3:59
  Did it feel like that?
• 4:01
  Yeah, look, I think moving out of the two-wheel drive and the rear-wheel drive realm into that four-wheel drive category was really that next step up.
• 4:10
  And again, it was scrounging that sort of money together to move into that next realm.
• 4:14
  And we did a couple of years where we really persisted inside the New South Wales Championship and those states of the championships where we had ebbs and flows.
• 4:24
  We'd have some really good events and then we'd have some really bad ones like I suppose any motorsport sport.
• 4:30
  Driver has, and then we finally started striking some success, and the biggest being, yeah, at Rally Australia in 2017 there.
• 4:37
  Had a really good run.
• 4:39
  Molly Tail and a few other guys there all sort of really bunched together, and finally on the last day we managed to get ourselves away there.
• 4:48
  But, yeah, Nathan Quinn being well too quick for us.
• 4:51
  It was one of those things that sort of reminded me, you know, why I love the sport and why I was trying to do what I was trying to do.
• 4:57
  So that 2017 was probably the year that solidified me actually staying in the sport and really dragged me in to go, you know, say, like, this is what I want to do.
• 5:07
  Just walk me through what you're doing separate to this in a business sense, because we're about to get to the point of the podcast here in some ways, but you have had other businesses that have ultimately, I think, helped you with this platform, haven't they?
• 5:24
  Yeah, look, essentially I started off as a builder.
• 5:27
  I'm a builder by trade and I sort of progressed through my, I suppose, years as a builder and then moved into sort of the building management side of things.
• 5:37
  And I've seen a real, I suppose, opening in the market when it come to how can we streamline moving around contracts and moving inside other businesses as a contractor that can make it easier.
• 5:49
  Yeah.
• 5:50
  That realm of moving into the IT space is where we connected with the insurance companies.
• 5:57
  Now, we started doing insurance building.
• 5:59
  So, in Australia, we have multiple storms and big events and floods and fires where we needed to somehow get thousands and thousands of people's insurance claims into one space and be able to move through them as quick as possible and give information.
• 6:15
  I suppose the biggest and best outcome that they required to get them over the line.
• 6:20
  So that was essentially where we first moved into that space.
• 6:25
  And then that's what brought me into the sport and motorsport space of seeing the similar sort of struggles where how can we move into main areas?
• 6:35
  streaming, I suppose, processes through motorsport, where over the years of doing multiple and multiple entries into sporting events, the monotonous of having to resubmit all that information again, make sure I've got valid licences, forgetting that I haven't got a valid licence.
• 6:55
  Putting all that together was something that I think across the board in motorsport was amazing.
• 7:00
  becoming a real pain point where you'd spend hours of trying to put that information together.
• 7:07
  That's when I had a bit of a chat with a few people in the industry, Adrian Coppenby one in the ARC.
• 7:12
  We spent some time with Motorsport Australia and some other categories, and I said...
• 7:17
  we can make this better.
• 7:18
  There's a way that we can get rid of all that monotonous paperwork.
• 7:22
  We can make sure that we're covering all the legal side of things and we're making sure that people are signing the right documents.
• 7:28
  And we can make that whole experience for competitors a whole lot easier and smoother across the board.
• 7:36
  That's how we moved into that space.
• 7:39
  I think when you say we, correct me if I'm wrong here too, you co-founded this...
• 7:44
  you know, might have even been in the very early days on the building side, was it with Matthew Herbert, for example, and then you have expanded on this side here into the motorsport space.
• 7:54
  The two things, Tom, seem like they should be worlds apart, but it's the way I think that you are cleverly harnessing information and putting it into the right places.
• 8:05
  Is that a simple enough description?
• 8:07
  Look, I think there's a correlation between just about everything when it comes to streamlining and we're moving into a new world.
• 8:15
  We're moving into that digital world now where it's not slowing down.
• 8:20
  We're not going backwards.
• 8:22
  That ability to do all those things manually are becoming so hard for everyone that we need to move aside quickly.
• 8:29
  Let that digital world come in.
• 8:31
  There's this AI space now that is huge around the world and is coming in very hard and heavy.
• 8:37
  But it's a very cool tool as well.
• 8:39
  Look, if it's used in the right way, it can be exhausted in different avenues and different places to be very, very useful, which is what we're essentially doing now.
• 8:48
  So...
• 8:49
  What we are attempting to do, and I'm saying attempting, but we will make it work, is you'll have one profile across all your motorsport disciplines and you can enter those events if you want to change discipline or you've got multiple cars.
• 9:04
  We've got multiple people in the industry that have more than one car, can have up to 10, 20, 30 different race cars.
• 9:10
  The ability for them to be able to enter those events at the click of a button and let your AI
• 9:19
  monotonous part.
• 9:20
  It helps.
• 9:21
  I mean, you're talking in a participant sense there, how it might help the competitor, but it helps the event organisers as well.
• 9:27
  And I think it does it in lots of, by the sounds of it, lots of very good practical ways too.
• 9:33
  So if for some silly reason you have overlooked a renewal on your licence, it'll trigger that, won't you?
• 9:40
  And let either the event organiser or the participant know, hey, this needs renewal and so on.
• 9:45
  Is that correct?
• 9:45
  Yeah, look, it's a smart digital system.
• 9:48
  The way that it's designed and developed is exactly that.
• 9:52
  It will alert you in every movement you make and make sure that nothing is ever missed.
• 9:57
  I think we all know, you know, as humans, we're very good at what we do, but we can make mistakes.
• 10:03
  The one thing when you're moving into the digital world and computers is they don't make mistakes.
• 10:08
  If they're designed right, they don't make mistakes and they don't miss anything.
• 10:12
  Yeah.
• 10:13
  The biggest pinch point, I think, for a lot of organisers and promoters, not just in Australia, but more globally, is that things can get missed.
• 10:20
  Documents aren't getting signed as regularly as they need to be.
• 10:25
  And that human error may be at a documentation where something may just go by the wayside.
• 10:30
  The system is taking away that space of those things getting missed and making sure that every single bit of compliance and every bit of information that is required is 100% getting to
• 10:43
  So, you know, we've got organisers around the country we're working with now in all forms of discipline that, you know, spending two, three hundred hours prior to an event to make sure that they're collecting that data and that information.
• 10:57
  And we're moving that down into the realm of 20 to 30 hours at max hours.
• 11:03
  but allowing the system to do all that, remove all that mundane, you know, administration, and just get back to them being able to run a really good event and really promote what they're doing inside their events.
• 11:15
  The platform gives an avenue for everyone to be able to see the events.
• 11:19
  So the general public can go in there, they can follow their favourite drivers, they can see what's going on and what those participants are doing.
• 11:26
  So,
• 11:26
  really opens up a realm of sport that hasn't been touched yet.
• 11:30
  You have built it as an all-in-one digital platform, rather bringing automation and AI into everything around event management, helping clubs, organisers, promoters spend less time around that administration that you're talking about.
• 11:44
  It is called...
• 11:45
  Wolf Sports, right?
• 11:47
  And you're proudly promoting the production class in the Australian Rally Championship, for example.
• 11:54
  But you have spread your wings here.
• 11:55
  A little birdie tells me you might have had meetings in New Zealand and you could potentially take this beyond our shores.
• 12:01
  Is this true?
• 12:02
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:03
  Look, I think we are probably one of the only companies in the world that are doing something of this magnitude.
• 12:10
  There's multiple different platforms and companies that do this for single sports, right?
• 12:17
  This is not built just for motorsport.
• 12:19
  Essentially,
• 12:20
  Once you have a profile, a Wolfsports profile that sits as an app, you will be able to move wherever you want to move.
• 12:28
  If you want to go enter a skateboarding event or you want to go enter a tennis tournament, you'll be able to use the same profile and the same click of a button and you allow the system to go in and collect the data it needs to move over to that discipline.
• 12:44
  It is a huge space that, again, has not been touched globally.
• 12:50
  And it's something that I'm passionate about making work.
• 12:52
  It's not a matter of when, it's how we actually do it now.
• 12:55
  But we're well on the way.
• 12:56
  We're working inside New Zealand.
• 12:59
  We're getting interest more globally.
• 13:01
  I think these days we've probably got 100,000 people going through the platform at any one time.
• 13:07
  And that's
• 13:08
  That's anywhere from competitors around the world to the general public being able to go in there and see the information.
• 13:14
  It's open to the public, but it's given to the organisers and promoters to be able to let the access there that they want.
• 13:22
  They can turn things on and off.
• 13:23
  We want the public to be able to see that.
• 13:25
  We don't want them to be able to see that.
• 13:27
  We want them to see our drivers.
• 13:28
  We don't.
• 13:29
  It gives full freedom and malleability for the organisers to set it up how they want.
• 13:34
  When the then competitors come in, they're essentially building a profile, like an Instagram profile that's just their sports profile.
• 13:42
  There is still more of this story to tell.
• 13:44
  Hope you're enjoying it.
• 13:45
  Stick around.
• 13:46
  We'll continue the convo with Tom Clark right after this.
• 13:51
  This is the Motorsport Brief, our Rusty's Garage shortcast, where we tackle a topic from time to time.
• 13:56
  Today, our guest is Tom Clark, whose Wolfsports platform has streamlining benefits for both competitors and those on the management side of motorsport.
• 14:06
  There is some great potential in this.
• 14:08
  As you'll hear, let's jump back into the convo now.
• 14:13
  I love that you've found this window.
• 14:16
  You could very easily, I mean, having come from a totally different work domain, maybe that's often what it needs, Tom, a fresh set of eyes to have a glance at things and see opportunity.
• 14:26
  I would imagine there was a lot of learnings along the way to try and fine tune this to get this right.
• 14:32
  Oh, mate, it's one of those things.
• 14:36
  When you're starting, I think something like this, it has its highs and it has its super lows.
• 14:41
  And I've been following that journey for the last couple of years now.
• 14:45
  We've gone into, you know, using pilot events and pilot organisers and pilot participants to be able to build something like this.
• 14:54
  This is not something that was just developed and then handed out to the public and said, how does it work?
• 15:01
  We used the competitors, we used the organisers, we collected data over, you know, 12, 24 months.
• 15:07
  So what are all the pinch points and what are all the pain points?
• 15:09
  What doesn't work and what do we require to make this better as a whole for everyone?
• 15:16
  So we built it that way.
• 15:18
  We essentially use the community as the consultants so that they've been able to then get exactly what they wanted and it be very close to the mark.
• 15:26
  But it doesn't mean there's never fine-tuning.
• 15:28
  That's something we know we're always going to be doing is turning into quite a big platform.
• 15:34
  There's a big team working on it full-time.
• 15:37
  So it's managing what comes next and how do we refine it to make it the biggest sports platform globally and that people can move around as many sports as they want and build profiles.
• 15:49
  Promoters can build their events and make sure that it's getting seen around the world.
• 15:54
  It's very hard these days to promote event when you're only using, I suppose, your own website or trying through social media.
• 16:02
  to get to your audience.
• 16:04
  But what we want to achieve is that it gets out to everyone.
• 16:08
  If it's a motorsport or event, I want to see cricket players, tennis players, surfers, skaters.
• 16:13
  I want everyone to be able to see and get inside motorsport and understand what it is.
• 16:18
  I love that.
• 16:18
  That was kind of my next question.
• 16:19
  Where would you like it to go?
• 16:21
  Can I pivot on the question then?
• 16:23
  Can you still dabble in a bit of motorsport to get that fix as you need it?
• 16:28
  We were together at the recent Naruma rally.
• 16:31
  You took your mighty Datsun stanza that you love across the ditch to a great event in Otago there earlier this year, which I know you want to go back to.
• 16:39
  Can you do a bit of that still or is this occupying most of your time?
• 16:43
  I might think it's imperative that I have to.
• 16:47
  I've got to hold my sanity together.
• 16:50
  Yeah, it's been ever since I started in 2009, it has been an outlet for me from being so busy from, I think,
• 16:59
  2009, I started racing.
• 17:01
  By 2010, I'd started my first business.
• 17:04
  So I think the passion for driving the car is one thing.
• 17:10
  The passion then to make sure that I've got money to do it revolves around, you know, like any motorsport person, we've got to have funding come in.
• 17:19
  It drives up through sponsors sometimes, but essentially a lot of us are self-funding and
• 17:26
  It's got to be there for multiple different reasons, but the main thing is probably my sanity.
• 17:31
  But that adrenaline, that adrenaline for me is very important to probably the way that I operate.
• 17:37
  Awesome.
• 17:37
  Been great to get you on the podcast today.
• 17:39
  And we are only telling a fraction of your story.
• 17:42
  I realize that, but I wanted to kind of shine a light on Wolf Sports in a broad sense.
• 17:47
  How can people in closing this conversation find out more about it?
• 17:51
  Mate, they can go visit the website.
• 17:54
  You'll see us all over social media.
• 17:57
  Very easy to get involved, very easy to build a profile.
• 18:00
  But the general public, they can go in there and they can start seeing their favourite events.
• 18:04
  They can start seeing who's there, who's participating in the event.
• 18:08
  But they can see all the details that maybe they haven't been able to see anywhere else.
• 18:13
  And it hasn't been available for organisers to get out to the public.
• 18:17
  But essentially, very soon, what's going to happen is this will be
• 18:21
  the uh the hub for sport and uh everyone will be able to see what's going and move around as freely as they want i will get on board now and build my skateboarding profiles been nice to catch up mate thanks for chatting with us today very good thanks rusty
• 18:36
  What is it with some of the rallying fraternity and some clever business innovation?
• 18:39
  I am keen to also get Luke Anir on the pod.
• 18:42
  You may know him from Safety Culture and seen his logos on Shane Van Gisbergen's NASCAR in the past year.
• 18:48
  Luke's had an involvement in the WRC as well and competed here in the Australian Rally Championship.
• 18:53
  That is another great Aussie success story with Motorsport Links.
• 18:58
  Thanks for the feedback on the recent two-part feature episode with Todd Hazelwood too.
• 19:02
  I think that that has helped a few of you realize the depth, and I mean incredible depth, of his commitment and how he's managed to forge a path kind of against the odds in some ways, out of pure drive and determination.
• 19:16
  Check that out if you haven't already.
• 19:17
  That is it for today.
• 19:18
  We'll catch you next time.
• 19:20
  Bye for now.