Latest / Rusty's Garage / Roland Dane (Part 1)

Transcript

Roland Dane (Part 1) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:14
  I'm automotive commentator and journalist Greg Rust, and this is Rusty's Garage.
• 0:27
  I'm in Melbourne for this episode on the eve of the Motorsport Australia Gala Awards.
• 0:32
  My guest is Roland Dane, an incredibly successful team owner with immense drive and a thirst for victory that's never waned over the years.
• 0:41
  His squad has a very impressive record in Australia and before that in the UK.
• 0:46
  In supercars alone, there are eight drivers championships, nine teams championships and seven wins in the famed Bathurst 1000.
• 0:55
  That's at the time we recorded.
• 0:56
  No doubt the tally will grow.
• 0:58
  If you follow Supercars, you'll have seen him entrenched in his Red Bull Holden Racing Team pit garage with a trademark notepad in his pocket, always keeping track of things to improve or fix.
• 1:11
  The story goes that he was once congratulated by a rival team owner for being among the few to build a profitable business in world motorsport.
• 1:19
  It's a tough game, and that's not easily done.
• 1:23
  With success comes the knockers.
• 1:25
  Not everyone who follows the sport likes him.
• 1:27
  They've labelled him a power broker and worse.
• 1:30
  That doesn't bother Roland, but if you listen, maybe your view will change or at least give you a greater appreciation for the man, his determination, his work ethic and management style.
• 1:43
  In many ways, he's like a champion chess player.
• 1:45
  He's like a champion chess player.
• 1:47
  Now, if you don't like some things he says, I'm not going to apologise for that.
• 1:50
  I've always believed the podcast was about our guest and their view.
• 1:56
  We'll even the ledger, if we need to, with the right of reply.
• 1:59
  That's another strong policy I have.
• 2:02
  We cover some ground in our discussion, including the high-profile defection of his long-standing engineer, Ludo Lacroix, how close he went to signing Simona DiSalvestro, and the shock decision by General Motors to kill off the legendary Holden brand.
• 2:16
  That's later.
• 2:17
  His journey began in the UK, where he gravitated to mechanical things from a very young age.
• 2:24
  I had my first car when I was 12 years old, which was a thing called a Morris Thousand, when we'd moved from Ireland to England.
• 2:33
  And my father decided I could spend £50 of my grandfather's money on buying a Morris Thousand that I could take apart, put back to back together, drive around the yard, and...
• 2:51
  Not that they called it a yard over there.
• 2:53
  But drove it around the paddock, as it were, and up and down the dirt road to their house, my parents' house there.
• 3:03
  Yeah, and then went on from there, to be honest.
• 3:05
  And by the time I was 16, I was heavily into motorcycles.
• 3:10
  Is it fair to say that you are a student of life, Roland, a student of motorsport?
• 3:16
  That probably sums you up in some ways?
• 3:19
  I've got plenty of interest outside motorsport, and I also like to think that the grounding that my parents and grandparents gave me enabled me to see more than just the field I operate in today.
• 3:37
  But, yeah, we've got a very diverse family and community,
• 3:42
  And even now I've got one daughter who loves motorsport and another one who loves horses.
• 3:49
  Very different.
• 3:50
  I think it does everyone good to have things outside their immediate sphere of work, as it were, even if it's something that you really enjoy.
• 4:00
  But you also can see further than that and enjoy other things.
• 4:05
  People see Roland Dane, the success story now, but it was far from that to begin with.
• 4:12
  It was very humble beginnings in many respects for you, wasn't it?
• 4:16
  Oh, certainly in motorsport I had to...
• 4:21
  I had to earn my stripes and I was never any good as a rider or a driver beyond a very amateur level.
• 4:29
  But even trying to run teams, everything I know and practice today comes from watching other people years ago and being lucky enough to be around some people.
• 4:45
  some very good operators, et cetera, being able to hang out for many years with my best mate, Derek Warwick, and really see with him some of the best operators in the business.
• 4:58
  But no, I left school when I was 18 in the UK and went to work for a Panther car company and building cars for the first 10 years or so of my life before I started working for myself.
• 5:12
  And then I had built up the business that I still have in the UK today that sells cars around the world.
• 5:20
  That in the late 80s, I built that up myself.
• 5:23
  And it's been a lot of fun at the same time as the motorsport.
• 5:28
  And motorsport's the thing that I've enjoyed the most.
• 5:32
  And I have had to put a lot of effort into trying to get it right.
• 5:36
  Were you a bit of a gopher at Panther?
• 5:38
  And what sort of roles did you have there?
• 5:39
  Because I sense it was many and varied and that helped you in lots of ways.
• 5:44
  Yeah, when I first went to work there, it was the company was owned and run by a guy called Robert Jenkel.
• 5:51
  And he was an entrepreneur, basically, from the fashion industry, you know, the rag trades, it was called in those days.
• 6:00
  But he loved cars, and he started building cars as a hobby, and then it became a business.
• 6:06
  And it was a very interesting business, but small, you know, 50, 60 people in the mid-70s when I first went to work there.
• 6:15
  But I was very privileged in that he took me immediately under his wing and then got me to work in each department of the business.
• 6:26
  So work in the body shop, work in the assembly shop, work in the paint shop, etc., work in the trim shop for a few months, work in the accounts department and work in the sales department to try and give me a broad understanding of what went in.
• 6:44
  to operating a business like that.
• 6:46
  So I actually looked back on that, and I was looking back at it and discussing it at a PWR board meeting the other day, this week, in that type of apprenticeship, informal apprenticeship, if you like, and how well it served me, and taking some of those lessons to discuss around the board table at PWR the other day.
• 7:10
  So I was very privileged.
• 7:12
  I wanna tap back into something you said a moment ago, cause I can hear our listeners saying, hey, ask more about that, about the fact that you did compete.
• 7:21
  So two part question.
• 7:23
  Firstly, the two wheel side, because I know you love the bikes.
• 7:27
  Was there a two wheel hero and what kind of bike racing did you do?
• 7:32
  So my father hated motorcycles and he wouldn't allow me to have anything more than a Honda 50, you know, like a posty bike.
• 7:41
  So I had a number of them.
• 7:45
  I think I had six or seven so that I could build one or two good ones out of the wreckage of six or seven of them.
• 7:52
  But...
• 7:55
  unbeknown to him, I don't think he ever knew actually until the day he died that halfway in between home and school, I had an arrangement with the father of a friend of mine to use one of his lockups.
• 8:09
  He had 50 odd lockup garages in the back of the town where the school was.
• 8:15
  So I dropped the posty bike in there because it wasn't cool to arrive at school on that.
• 8:20
  And I had a Honda 305,
• 8:24
  that I rode then to school.
• 8:27
  So I was heavily into them.
• 8:30
  And when I moved out of home into London, when I was first working for Panther, I started racing motorcycles and joined local club and et cetera.
• 8:43
  I think it was called the ACU in the UK, the equivalent of Motorsport Australia or something on two wheels.
• 8:49
  Got my licence, went and bought a thing called a Triumph Tiger Cub.
• 8:55
  And with a mate of mine who was one of the people sharing the house with, we bought an old Ford Transit, a knackered Ford Transit, and put our bikes in the back and went racing.
• 9:07
  And the first year was an absolute disaster
• 9:14
  some of the shittiest bikes you'd ever come across.
• 9:17
  We were lucky if we got a lap of practice before they broke down or something happened or whatever, a combination of breaking down, us falling off.
• 9:24
  It was a particularly useless period.
• 9:27
  But luckily, somebody had invented Yamahas.
• 9:30
  And I loved those bikes, the 250s and the 400s.
• 9:35
  We used to race the 400s and the 500 class.
• 9:40
  Two strokes, which you could work on very easily.
• 9:43
  take a part very easily in the front room of the house and put together yourself etc you could play with them you could tune them you could learn a lot pretty quickly on how to make them go and of course they're always reliable so you get a full day's racing and so that was my first you know three or four years or so of racing was on was on two wheels
• 10:09
  Were you getting the knee down and were there ambitions to be, I don't know, a Barry Sheen or a Kenny Roberts or somebody like that?
• 10:17
  Well, I certainly wasn't getting the knee down.
• 10:20
  Production tyres in those days weren't really good enough to do that, even if I'd been good enough.
• 10:26
  But, yeah, I spent an awful lot of time going as well to watch bike racing.
• 10:32
  I loved going to watch bike racing.
• 10:35
  And some huge crowds in those days in the 70s, particularly going to watch bike racing.
• 10:42
  big money races, you know, where guys were getting paper bags full of cash to go and race in those days, you know, the stars, they'd rock up.
• 10:50
  And so, and watching people like Agostini, Phil Reid, Barry Sheen, Kenny Roberts race when they'd come to the UK.
• 11:01
  And we used to go to Assen as well, because that was a
• 11:05
  And it still remains a traditional trek for poms.
• 11:10
  Like four-wheel ones go to watch Le Mans.
• 11:14
  And two-wheels people always go to the Dutch TT to us.
• 11:18
  And so we'd go over there each year.
• 11:22
  But certainly the heroes, I mean, you've recently spoken to one of the heroes from that era, and I haven't listened to it yet, but Graham Crosby.
• 11:33
  Yeah.
• 11:34
  who I met for the first time a couple of years ago in New Zealand.
• 11:37
  But he was a real hero.
• 11:42
  Greg Hansford, because he really had to wring the neck of his Kawasaki.
• 11:50
  On the big bike, it just wasn't as quick as the Yamaha's.
• 11:53
  On the smaller bike, he was too big for them.
• 11:55
  He was really too big for 250s and 350s, which is why he struggled to beat Cork Bellington, who's South African, who lives in Australia now.
• 12:04
  So those guys were definitely people that I looked up to, watched, was fascinated by their lifestyle as well.
• 12:15
  They had Mercedes Sprinter vans, 308 diesel vans I think they were, with a caravan on the bag.
• 12:25
  one or two mechanics often themselves and three or four bikes in the back.
• 12:31
  And they'd go off and they'd race every weekend.
• 12:33
  And the Grand Prix's didn't really pay them any money, but these other races would pay them big money.
• 12:40
  And so to go to places like Mallory Park or Brown's Hatch or Alton Park and watch them rock up and compete, you know, do...
• 12:51
  20 laps 25 lap races but do it three or four times during the during the day and sometimes on different bikes um with yeah the front row had as many people as could stuff onto the front row it wasn't wasn't very organized those that those races but they were fantastic
• 13:07
  Great period, great memories that you've recounted there.
• 13:10
  There is a four-wheel chapter for you two driving, and I want to say it's a Honda Civic.
• 13:15
  Is that right?
• 13:15
  Tell me about that.
• 13:16
  Where did you race?
• 13:17
  How did you go?
• 13:17
  And I think even when Jess arrived, very soon after Jess arrived into the world, you still went off racing, didn't you?
• 13:24
  Yeah, so the first car I bought was a Ford Fiesta, actually.
• 13:28
  I had one-make Fiesta racing in the early 80s.
• 13:32
  I'd finished bike racing when I realised that I wasn't quite stupid enough, I don't think.
• 13:40
  I was a member of the Self-Preservation Society, and almost every other person, every time we'd race at Snetton, wasn't.
• 13:48
  And so I had a lot of fun, but then I decided I fell off.
• 13:53
  I didn't break anything, but I badly hurt my shoulder.
• 13:57
  And so I thought, okay, well, time for four wheels.
• 14:01
  I'd got married as well.
• 14:03
  So I had a Fiesta one-make car, which I did a little bit in, a couple of seasons of racing with that.
• 14:12
  Then setting up business, all the rest of it.
• 14:15
  So for several years I didn't race, et cetera.
• 14:18
  And my first daughter, Alexandra, was born.
• 14:23
  And then I got back into it on the back of really –
• 14:30
  being encouraged by Derek.
• 14:33
  And so ended up with Honda Civic CRX, the little one-make championship, and then migrating into what was called Group N back then with Civics.
• 14:45
  And it was a very enjoyable experience.
• 14:50
  period.
• 14:52
  I wasn't brilliant at it, but we now did get a good result because it was half wet and I was the only person who could afford new tyres or whatever it was at the time.
• 15:03
  I enjoyed it a lot.
• 15:05
  You've touched on business and your success there.
• 15:08
  And the guys at the car sales website here in Australia reminded me of, I mean, there's been restaurants, hotels, things like that, but you touched on the car company before that.
• 15:18
  and the longevity of that and what you've done.
• 15:20
  Just expand on it a little bit more.
• 15:22
  I mean, there was one year there, I think, where you...
• 15:24
  It might have been Rolls or Bentleys, I can't remember, maybe both.
• 15:26
  You sold nearly 100 in a year, and were you hands-on with that?
• 15:32
  What were you doing?
• 15:33
  Oh, very hands-on.
• 15:34
  We were selling right-hand drive vehicles around the Asian markets, really.
• 15:41
  Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, all right-hand drive, same as the UK.
• 15:51
  And there was an active parallel market in luxury cars that we were servicing big time.
• 16:00
  And in 1993, yeah, I sold 93 new Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars that were the same company then.
• 16:09
  and a year or two before, they had some new model come out and sent a note to all the dealers in the UK that there were two people's names that they didn't want to see on the waiting list, and one was a guy called William Locker, and a very successful UK dealer, even today, and myself.
• 16:26
  And I took that as a bit of an honour that they didn't...
• 16:29
  But by the time we got to 93, the UK was having a very hard time.
• 16:34
  So at the end of that year, I actually got a Christmas card from the Rolls-Royce boss,
• 16:39
  Thanks for your efforts.
• 16:41
  And so that had been, it wasn't good in the UK business at that point, but overseas for us, it was extremely good.
• 16:50
  People talk now about, you know, the challenges of doing business in Asia.
• 16:53
  Did you find that challenging?
• 16:55
  What were the learnings in that period like that?
• 16:57
  I had to learn it the hard way.
• 16:59
  So I'd learned something about dealing in the Middle East with Panther in the early 80s.
• 17:05
  And then, yeah, I first went to Japan in 1986.
• 17:09
  And from there...
• 17:14
  had to quite quickly, you know, there wasn't the resources, if you like, in terms of looking up and Googling, how do you operate business-wise in Japan?
• 17:23
  So I had to learn it pretty quickly and then understand that Asia wasn't all the same.
• 17:30
  So what was good etiquette in Japan wasn't in Thailand or Malaysia, et cetera.
• 17:36
  So...
• 17:37
  And in those days, that was pre-single market in Europe.
• 17:42
  And I had an Irish passport and an English passport, which I still have, but I have an Australian one as well now.
• 17:48
  But the way that Irish and English systems got treated in different colours, in different countries, rather, for visa to visa changed where you were.
• 17:59
  So in Japan...
• 18:00
  you always used the English passport because the Irish one, you needed a visa to get in.
• 18:05
  So you used the Pomi one to get in there.
• 18:08
  On the other hand, if I'd gone to Brunei on an Irish one, they would have thought I was a member of the IRA or something, so you used the English one.
• 18:16
  In Malaysia, you'd go in there and you'd get three months on your passport if you were Irish and two weeks if you were English.
• 18:24
  So you quickly learnt how to...
• 18:27
  how to operate under, uh, across the different countries and the different cultures.
• 18:33
  Um, and it's something to be honest today, I still value the fact that, you know, one of my oldest friends is the Lamborghini dealer in Hong Kong, um, who was just texting me last night to ask if one of his nephews could come and spend the weekend with us at the Grand Prix because he's into karting in, in China.
• 18:51
  I want to, before we get to Derek Warwick and more of the motorsport stuff in a second here, I want to just turn right very briefly.
• 18:57
  A quick little yarn that people mightn't know is that you project-managed a hovercraft build.
• 19:05
  I think you were testing it in a lake by the M4 in the UK or something or other.
• 19:08
  Tell us a bit about that project.
• 19:10
  You've done a bit of homework.
• 19:14
  So I've become...
• 19:17
  very interested in hovercraft in the late 70s, when I was racing bikes as well, or actually before that, before I left home.
• 19:26
  I'd met a guy called Nigel Beale, and he was a professor at Cranfield University, but he was also a hovercraft nutcase.
• 19:39
  And he had...
• 19:43
  come up with this kit or set of drawings that really plus some bits and pieces to put together your own hovercraft using a little Rotax two-stroke engine and everything.
• 19:55
  And anyway, so I was also fascinated because he had come up with a concept in 1978.
• 20:02
  You remember the fan car, the Brabham fan car?
• 20:05
  Well, Chapman had gone to him the next day after that Swedish Grand Prix and said, we need your expertise to make our own fan car with two fans, one in either side pod.
• 20:17
  anyway it didn't come to anything because it got banned as you know the the brabham and so it put the lid on it but he was the go-to person for uh for yeah fans hovercraft of of um smaller sized hovercraft etc so i built this this hovercraft in the in the garage at my parents house actually when i was um still at school and um
• 20:41
  I road tested it first across their lawns, and I made the skirt on my mother's sewing machine for it, which I was very proud of at the time.
• 20:52
  She wasn't particularly happy with the way her sewing machine was treated.
• 20:57
  But it all worked, and the day I first ran it, I actually killed one of my father's ornamental ducks.
• 21:04
  He had a load of ornamental ducks around the property, and I ran one over and unfortunately killed it because I wasn't steering it very well.
• 21:12
  But I learnt how to steer it and then started racing that as well, and that was real...
• 21:20
  It was a lot of fun, actually, to...
• 21:22
  I didn't do that much of it, but over a couple of years, I raced that hovercraft and had a lot of near misses, let me tell you, because they're quick on wet grass, especially country estates where they'd hold those races.
• 21:38
  They were hair racing.
• 21:39
  Anyway, off the back of that, it so happened that Robert Jenkel at Panther had got an inquiry from a guy in the Bahamas to build a hovercraft for him.
• 21:56
  And so we were going to end up building this six-seater hovercraft at Panther.
• 22:03
  at Panther, well it was actually at Robert's house in Weybridge, in the barns there, that we built this aluminium hulled hovercraft with input from this guy from Cranfield, Nigel Beale, and we used two Honda...
• 22:18
  Honda Goldwing engines, which were four-cylinder in those days.
• 22:22
  So one of my best friends, who still runs my business in England for me, was working at a motorcycle dealer, and I rang him up and bought two Honda Goldwings off him, and we then took the engines out of and made into the power units for this hovercraft.
• 22:40
  which, yes, we tested extensively at Thorpe Park, which is next to the M3, not that far from Heathrow.
• 22:49
  We tested extensively in there, and we delivered it to Old Mate in America.
• 22:56
  But I didn't really hear anything more about it after that.
• 23:00
  I love it.
• 23:00
  Roland Dane, hovercraft racer.
• 23:02
  I never thought I'd use those words.
• 23:05
  The connection with Derek Warwick, let's expand on that a little bit for people listening.
• 23:09
  I mean, ex-Formula One racer, Le Mans winner, World Sports Cars, did BTCC as well.
• 23:16
  He, in recent years, had a bit of a battle with cancer, which I'm pleased he's clear of, which is good news.
• 23:23
  How did the relationship between the two of you come together?
• 23:26
  It's been strong in a friendship sense, in a business sense, hasn't it really?
• 23:30
  Yeah.
• 23:31
  Yeah, so we've known each other for well over 30 years now.
• 23:34
  And along the way, we've had some huge ups and downs.
• 23:41
  But to be honest, in the late 80s, early 90s, I was actually in many ways closer to his younger brother.
• 23:52
  And Paul was an up-and-coming racer in Formula 3 and Formula 3000.
• 23:59
  And, of course, he lived on the mainland in the UK, not very far from me, whereas Derek lived in Jersey, and the Channel Islands still does.
• 24:10
  And Paul's best friend, back in those days, that he'd known since he was a kid, is still one of my closest friends today as well, from that area of Hampshire in the south of England.
• 24:26
  So...
• 24:27
  The thing that really drew, though, Derek and I together was the tragedy around his brother.
• 24:35
  And we went from being mates to then really being best mates around that time, July 1991, when Paul was killed.
• 24:49
  Formula 3000 car at Alton Park.
• 24:53
  And it was still remains today the most traumatic day of my life and certainly for him as well and his family.
• 25:02
  And it was then after that, in the aftermath of that, which was extremely difficult for him because, you know, do I race, don't I race, do I carry on, etc.
• 25:11
  ?
• 25:12
  Um, but also, yeah, the fact that he'd been, um, I wouldn't say pushing Paul so hard, but he'd been facilitating Paul.
• 25:21
  Yeah.
• 25:21
  He'd been opening doors for him as you would, if you're a formula one driver and everything, and you've got an up and coming younger brother, uh, who to be honest, had the potential to be faster than Derek and, uh, was, um, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh,
• 25:36
  Derek then, I think he felt a bit responsible for it to his parents and everything, etc., which he shouldn't have done.
• 25:44
  If he did, he shouldn't have done.
• 25:46
  But he took it very hard.
• 25:48
  And so we...
• 25:51
  We spent an awful lot of time talking to each other and traveling, et cetera, in the aftermath of that.
• 25:59
  So, yeah, we'd already raced together in terms of his... My Hondas were run out of one of his dealerships and all that sort of thing, but that really brought us together big time, unfortunately, on the back of that tragedy.
• 26:14
  The learnings from him too, I think I'm right in saying that for you...
• 26:20
  He could help the cut through.
• 26:22
  Motor racing, in the public sense, is this bright, shiny thing, and, you know, it has its moments.
• 26:27
  But as an owner, as someone who's embedded in the sport, you need to cut through in engineering debriefs.
• 26:33
  You need to get to the heart of things to make stuff better, to win and so forth.
• 26:37
  And he was very good at helping you learn in that side of it, I think.
• 26:41
  Is that correct?
• 26:41
  Yeah, he certainly made a big difference to me in terms of increasing my knowledge at a professional level much faster than I otherwise would have done.
• 26:56
  But also the fact that he had worked with some good people that I could also see.
• 27:02
  When you walked into that Peugeot garage, for instance, 92, when they were running the Sports Car World Championship the year he won Le Mans,
• 27:12
  But when you walked into the garage or wherever they were racing, etc., you could see a level of calmness, a level of professionalism that was missing from a lot of places.
• 27:25
  You could see when...
• 27:28
  He was racing the Jaguar the year before, the XJR 14, where Ross Braun was the guy who designed this and the chief engineer there, et cetera.
• 27:41
  You can see an attention to detail in the car, et cetera, which was something to look up to at the time.
• 27:48
  I mean, to be honest, those cars...
• 27:51
  from both the Jaguar at that time and the Persia, and probably the Sauber at the time.
• 27:58
  I wasn't close enough to it, but they were better than half the F1 grid in terms of the way that they were put together and the way that they were very good bits of engineering, which is why, of course,
• 28:11
  Yeah, certain people in the motorsport world decided that Group C as it was then shouldn't really exist and that Formula One had to be the preeminent thing and really snuffed Group C out.
• 28:27
  Was there ever a want to go to Formula One?
• 28:30
  You know, I mean, we look at what you've achieved in England and here, and we'll get to that in a moment, but was Formula One ever on your radar, and if not, why not?
• 28:40
  Well, I was offered a job as a buyer at a...
• 28:45
  small team, Fittipaldi team in 1980.
• 28:48
  I think it was 79 or 80 when I was a Panther.
• 28:53
  And I didn't take it.
• 28:54
  And maybe I should have done as a way in.
• 28:58
  But then Derek and I used to talk about it in the early 90s.
• 29:02
  You know, is there a point at which we could do something?
• 29:07
  You know, was it achievable and everything?
• 29:09
  And to be honest, we saw the pain that some of the people were going through at that stage.
• 29:14
  You know, I knew I knew my girl who was running the Moneytron team or Onyx became Moneytron, etc.
• 29:22
  in the late that sort of late 80s, early 90s period.
• 29:27
  And you can see how hard work that was.
• 29:30
  Then Eddie Jordan came along in 91.
• 29:34
  and heard all the stories back then about how hard it was to keep going.
• 29:42
  And honestly, we thought it was, no, we're not prepared to take those risks.
• 29:51
  By the time we were in sort of mid-90s, we weren't prepared to.
• 29:55
  So there is a little backstory about Triple Eight, what it means in terms of its name.
• 30:01
  What was the point where you decided to form this and hit the go button and in a business sense go motor racing?
• 30:08
  Yeah, well, I was driving myself early 90s, etc.
• 30:14
  I was also owned...
• 30:18
  several BTCC cars that James Kay was driving, for instance, in 93, yeah, 92, 93.
• 30:31
  And then there was the opportunity to be part of something becoming more professional, setting up as a business.
• 30:42
  uh with derek um ian harrison and an engineer called john gentry and so and this was really mid-90s btcc was extremely strong almost too strong for its own good you know there are too many manufacturers there they couldn't all win and um
• 31:03
  Derek was a very successful Honda dealer by that stage, with, I can't remember, four or five different dealerships in the south of England.
• 31:13
  So...
• 31:15
  there was an opportunity to potentially take on the Honda deal if we could put something together.
• 31:22
  Well, we didn't get that, but then we did get GM because GM Vauxhall, the motorsport manager, rang Derek and said, I gather you're trying to put something together.
• 31:34
  Would you be interested in doing it for us?
• 31:36
  So, um, so Derek called me and said, I said, yeah, well, let's try and do it.
• 31:41
  And I put the business plan together for it and, and gave it to, uh, to GM and they, they took us on and that started a relationship, which in the UK lasted until 2009, you know, on the back end of the GFC when it, when it eventually finished.
• 31:57
  But, um, and I also, um,
• 32:01
  Very good operator in Harrison, who remains a good friend today.
• 32:07
  And Derek, myself, we were not only building and running cars in the UK, but we were also selling cars to Sweden.
• 32:17
  We had a couple of cars running in Turkey at one point.
• 32:20
  We were running a one-make car.
• 32:22
  series for Vauxhall as well with the Vectors in the late 90s as well.
• 32:28
  So it was a good period, a very busy period and a good period.
• 32:34
  And we had a really nice factory, an old Ministry of Defence site in between Banbury and Silverstone.
• 32:45
  that latterly has been used by Multimatic and Ganazzi to run their Ford program, which finished the end of last year, but in Europe.
• 32:56
  But that building was built like a brick shithouse because it was so well built.
• 33:03
  And it was...
• 33:05
  part of a listening station for GCHQ because it was on a very high bit of ground.
• 33:11
  So beautifully built place.
• 33:15
  We put together, I think, a pretty good operation there.
• 33:31
  Common causes of oversteer.
• 33:33
  Cold tires, rear wheel drive, wet roads, or the most common, P-platers and peer pressure.
• 33:41
  You've ridden some great waves, you know, a golden period in supercars in Australia, super touring in the 90s.
• 33:46
  I mean, when you spoke about that before, it was awesome.
• 33:49
  Insane budgets, fantastic racing, engineering that was phenomenal.
• 33:54
  How big, give us a sense of how big that operation got with all the categories you talked about running before.
• 34:00
  And, you know, the Vectra program was a big deal, wasn't it?
• 34:03
  Yeah, it wasn't the biggest, though, in those days.
• 34:06
  I mean, our budget was one of the smaller ones, but it still seems obscene today.
• 34:13
  We got up to about 60 people, probably just over at the height of it.
• 34:19
  And when we were running three cars with a full factory budget in 2000.
• 34:27
  So, yeah, it was big.
• 34:30
  We were making very good money out of it, but we didn't have the budget that ProDrive had from Ford, for instance, and Nissan, they were spending as well with RML.
• 34:44
  So I could see that it was going to implode, honestly.
• 34:50
  And the marketing budgets in the UK were starting to be cut drastically.
• 34:57
  The world was changing.
• 34:59
  The UK, the car market, I can't remember which of the manufacturers coined the term, but in the 90s, they used to call it Treasure Island because they were making so much money there.
• 35:10
  So, but that started to change.
• 35:13
  The world started to change in late 90s and got a lot more difficult.
• 35:20
  And this was even pre 9-11.
• 35:22
  And so budgets got cut and we had to very quickly cut our cloth at 888 to suit a brave new world in 2001 with BTCC, where almost
• 35:34
  all the other teams had either disappeared overnight or had to find something else to do.
• 35:39
  It's a strength of yours, isn't it?
• 35:42
  You're not just thinking about Australian Grand Prix next or Winton down the road.
• 35:47
  You're thinking years in advance.
• 35:49
  Have you always been like that?
• 35:51
  Oh, I've tried to anticipate things because, don't forget, I've worked in the broader industry for so long.
• 35:59
  And, you know, I'm a very keen student of what's going on around the world, in the car world, et cetera, in particular.
• 36:07
  And so, therefore, some of the things that have happened you can anticipate.
• 36:14
  You can't anticipate the effects of viruses or something, but you can see what's happening now.
• 36:21
  In a developing automotive world, and so some of the road bumps have been possible to foresee.
• 36:29
  You can't always avoid them, but maybe you can lessen the blow sometimes.
• 36:33
  And so in that period, in the early 2000s, it was very necessary to...
• 36:41
  just for BTCC to survive, to recut the category, recut the series on a completely different financial level.
• 36:52
  Otherwise, it would have withered away.
• 36:55
  Before that period of change, one box that you ticked, which I think is really cool, is Bathurst.
• 37:04
  You knew from family about Bathurst.
• 37:06
  Am I right in saying you used to get kind of newspaper clippings or something or other sent to your family?
• 37:10
  He would talk to you about it.
• 37:13
  And it was always held in really high regard by you, even before you came here in the late 90s, wasn't it?
• 37:19
  Yeah, my godfather, who's long passed away now, but he was a GP in Adelaide.
• 37:29
  And so he, very early on, I can't remember when, but for years and years, he gave me a subscription to Wheels magazine.
• 37:38
  And I always... To be honest, I loved the magazine anyway because it was, in those days, it wasn't an advertorial.
• 37:47
  It was a very irreverent magazine and it had a different approach.
• 37:55
  But it also showed me, for the first time, exposed me to Bathurst and stories about it.
• 38:03
  And then the...
• 38:05
  In the mid-'80s, when the likes of Walkinshaw, Soper, et cetera, were coming out and racing at Bathurst, in the sort of Group A era, the BBC used to show highlights of the race later the same day, obviously a big time difference, so they'd show one or two-hour highlights package.
• 38:31
  uh etc and it was pretty wild uh to see this circuit you know and see how how good the racing was or looked at next to what uh the average one we had in in circuit we had in the uk so um so i had an appreciation of it but of course then in uh in 97 uh when uh
• 38:53
  and Vesco, as it was then, and Toka Australia, and they're all at war, et cetera.
• 39:01
  And it wasn't our war over in the UK, but we were given the opportunity to be mercenaries and come out and paid very big money to come and race in 97 and 98 at Pathurst in the two-litre race.
• 39:19
  So, of course, we took it with open arms.
• 39:21
  Firstly, our season was over.
• 39:22
  Second, we all wanted to come here.
• 39:24
  And thirdly, we were going to earn some good coin.
• 39:27
  So we came, yeah, 97.
• 39:29
  Derek drove with Brockie.
• 39:32
  um and uh then back in then 98 uh we had um derek driving with clelland and we had uh also murphy driving with ingle in a car that holden paid for separately to be honest i think we got paid for that twice
• 39:52
  I think Channel 7 paid us and Holden paid us.
• 39:55
  So that was... 98 was a good result.
• 39:58
  But it was an engineering challenge because we'd never driven, you know, raced the cars that far.
• 40:05
  And so we had... You know, we did...
• 40:09
  Quite a lot of testing during not so much 97 because it crept up in 97 pretty quickly.
• 40:15
  But when we realized what the challenge was in 98, we did two tests at Pembry in Wales with a specific aim of running the cars for eight hours to see what they stand up to.
• 40:30
  Yeah, and there were a couple of very slow corners there that sort of put a big strain on the front-wheel drive system.
• 40:36
  And we ended up, the weak point of the cars was the universal joint on the front axle, both sides.
• 40:45
  And so we ended up having this grease, which would actually run the 1,000 Ks, which was, I think, 1,200 pounds a tin,
• 40:56
  And we needed half a dozen tins of this stuff to get us through the weekend.
• 41:02
  So it was crazy, and it worked.
• 41:06
  The grease worked, but unfortunately, a couple of other things happened.
• 41:09
  When Derek drove off of the fuel tower attached to the car in the race, which caused us plenty of hassle, and Russell crashed at the skyline on somebody else's oil.
• 41:24
  So it wasn't as...
• 41:26
  Yeah, I think we could have been podium that day.
• 41:30
  Certainly with the Ingle Murphy car, we could have been on the podium.
• 41:35
  Probably not beaten the Nissan or the Volvo that day, but we could have been on the podium.
• 41:40
  Did you fall in love with the place?
• 41:42
  And was it, you know, everything and more in terms of what you'd read about?
• 41:46
  And what was it like?
• 41:48
  You know, people listening to the podcast will fondly remember Brockie, who's gone now and has been since 06.
• 41:53
  What was it like working with him?
• 41:56
  Yeah, I'd met him a couple of times in the UK, because he'd come over regularly and spend time with Gow, with Alan Gow, who ran BTCC.
• 42:05
  And Gow's missus and mine were very friendly, etc.
• 42:12
  So I'd met him, you know, I knew him, half knew him before, you know.
• 42:18
  So...
• 42:20
  uh and he obviously had a few quirks and i really like to like to have some herbal tea on on him at all times etc and we but we just we went with the flow honestly because he was the superstar when we came over he was the star and uh so we did what we needed to do to work around that and and give him what what he needed we tried to point out that rear-wheel drive
• 42:42
  cars the rear tires are cold and but his first lap uh in 97 he he rolled it um he rolled it at the kink you know coming into the caltex chase um he rolled it and yeah took us an all-nighter and most of the next day to to rebuild the car to get it out on track again after that and after that he realized the rear tires needed a bit of work to get the temp up on a front wheel drive car um but yeah it was a
• 43:11
  It was fascinating.
• 43:12
  The real thing, though, that was depressing was you had this magnificent track and you had an absolute shithole of a pit lane.
• 43:25
  And I couldn't believe that you'd got this beautiful circuit.
• 43:29
  And the facilities there were just dreadful.
• 43:32
  I mean, it was worse than...
• 43:36
  Snetterton had been 20 years before and and that was shitty so uh that was a disappointment big disappointment to see how crap they were since then it's gone through a massive uh massive upgrade and we'll get to your your supercar stuff in a second did you ever entertain the idea of moving to MotoGP was it some chat about maybe a 125 or a Moto3 team that you loosely toyed with the idea of expanding into am I am I correct there
• 44:06
  well it's more a case of sort of going off and doing that instead if you like um a few years ago i can't remember exactly 2010 2011 or something and thinking that that uh that would be something good to go and do and um because i still love it yeah i still love uh the whole bike scene and um
• 44:31
  And I worked on a couple of opportunities that I thought could, there might be something to do there, but they never got beyond embryonic stage, unfortunately.
• 44:42
  But, yeah, it's a chapter that, yeah, that ship's sailed now, but it's a chapter I wish that maybe I should have put more effort into it because it would have been fun.
• 44:54
  Early 2000s.
• 44:55
  I think you'll tell me if I've got this incorrect, but you're about 45 years old.
• 45:00
  You start discussions about a move to Australia and supercars.
• 45:03
  What was the beginning of that?
• 45:05
  What was the point where you thought, I'm going to get on this freight train and have a crack at this?
• 45:10
  Yeah, there are a few things going on.
• 45:13
  To be honest, so personally, I had a divorce, separated in 1999.
• 45:22
  Mm-hmm.
• 45:24
  And business-wise,
• 45:29
  needed a new challenge.
• 45:31
  BTCC had, you know, on the back of having to reposition it, the cars weren't very exciting.
• 45:40
  They were very necessary at the time, but pretty boring compared with what we had beforehand.
• 45:47
  And there wasn't as much money in it, obviously, so you couldn't earn as much from it.
• 45:52
  So a number of different things.
• 45:55
  And so...
• 45:58
  I'd been out to 2001.
• 46:00
  I came to Surfers Paradise to the IndyCar race, caught up with people I knew there, had a look around, met Cochran for the first time, spoke to him about what was going on and what it looked like, what the commercial landscape was.
• 46:21
  Came back in a year later, did the same thing and thought, and I thought, look, honestly, I'm sort of ready to have a serious look at this.
• 46:31
  And then I hadn't done very much about it, but the early 03, the Wilkinshaw group fell over.
• 46:42
  And so, as you know, Holden went and picked up the pieces.
• 46:47
  But, of course, Holden, being a manufacturer, weren't allowed to own the teams.
• 46:52
  So they had to then divest themselves, if you like, of the two teams that Walkinshaw had been running.
• 47:01
  Mm-hmm.
• 47:02
  And, um, so a guy called, um, Kevin Whale was an Australian who'd worked at Holden and, uh, and also at GM in Singapore.
• 47:12
  By this time he was running, uh, GM in the UK.
• 47:15
  And so we'd reported to him, you know, he was my direct report, if you like, for, for, for AAA in the UK.
• 47:22
  And, um...
• 47:24
  I said to him, you know, any chance?
• 47:26
  I think we could go down there and do a good job.
• 47:28
  And he tried to facilitate the introductions, et cetera.
• 47:32
  But the politics around it all was out of control, as I can see now.
• 47:39
  Later, I could see.
• 47:41
  And they offered us the...
• 47:43
  um second tier thing with the which then became the kelly's board um they offered us that but i said no if we can't be the main thing then i don't want to be a part of it to be honest um and scafee ended up with it and yeah in hindsight it's very good not to have got involved with it because it all got very messy later on and all the rest of it but um
• 48:08
  But then Paul Ruddysh had said, look, this guy, John Briggs in Brisbane, he's probably gone as far as he can with it, and there could be an opportunity there to do something.
• 48:24
  So I went and saw him, I think, in...
• 48:27
  june or july 03 uh and i'd never been to brisbane apart from the airport before uh so anyway by this time i already bought an apartment in torak uh which turned out to be on the floor above scafies but anyway
• 48:46
  um that was uh and he emerged later but i only ever stayed in the one in torek i think three nights or four nights or something i owned it for a few years but the um but then suddenly because i thought that would be the place to be but suddenly brisbane was on the radar and so i went and saw john um and we
• 49:05
  sat down, went through it all, et cetera, and he told me what he thought it was worth, and I told him what I thought it was worth, and he said, okay, well, thanks very much, but no thanks.
• 49:15
  So I said, no problem, and went out for dinner with some people and everything, and then went to the airport the next day.
• 49:22
  And as I was at the airport, he rang up and said, oh, maybe your figure is okay.
• 49:27
  And I said, all right.
• 49:29
  Okay, well, then I'll get to work on it.
• 49:31
  And I got KPMG to go and have a look at it, et cetera, and check it all stacked up.
• 49:37
  And he had some better electrical money at the moment, and I said, well, you better make sure that's transferable for at least...
• 49:45
  2004 as well, et cetera, and some forward money.
• 49:49
  And, yep, okay, then I said, I'll take the plunge.
• 49:54
  And so I took the plunge along with some money as well from Derek and from Peter Butterley.
• 50:04
  old Irish friend, who was spending quite a lot of time in Australia himself as well at that time, and bought it.
• 50:14
  And then had to figure out really what was going on and how the championship worked and how the sporting and technical side of it worked really over...
• 50:27
  over 2004 and try and set ourselves up during that first year of competition in 04 for then doing the job properly.
• 50:36
  You know, there's a huge learning in 04, but also trying to get the right drivers, get the right people in the team, put a good crew together through that period.
• 50:48
  And there were some good people already there.
• 50:50
  They just needed the right leadership.
• 50:53
  And some of those people are still around me today, as you know.
• 50:59
  That's the end of lap one of my chat with Roland Dane.
• 51:01
  Make sure you head back to the library and check out part two, where we talk about losing a long-standing member of his engineering staff to an arch-rival team and the shock of GM's decision to turn out the lights at Holden.
• 51:16
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 51:20
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 51:23
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 51:31
  Listener.