Latest / Rusty's Garage / Roland Dane (Part 2)

Transcript

Roland Dane (Part 2) · Rusty's Garage

• 0:02
  A listener production.
• 0:19
  G'day, it's Rusty here, getting ready for the second part of my chat with respected and revered Supercars team owner, Roland Dane.
• 0:27
  If you haven't already listened to part one, make sure you check it out.
• 0:30
  From his early days on a farm tractor on the family property in the UK, to building and racing a hovercraft of all things, and successfully establishing himself in the automotive and racing businesses.
• 0:43
  He has some cool cars in the collection, as you'll hear in Part 2.
• 0:47
  A move to Australia and supercars in the early 2000s was the start of a very special chapter in his career.
• 0:54
  He'd been successful in BTCC and, you know, that environment.
• 0:59
  There's obviously lots of learnings in that.
• 1:00
  Australia is...
• 1:02
  a different sandpit and different kinds of race cars.
• 1:05
  Did you come into it and go, okay, I've got a plan of, you know, three years, I want to be winning in two?
• 1:12
  What approach did you take to it?
• 1:15
  So I thought I'd give it three years to try and stack up, see if we can make it stack up.
• 1:20
  And by stack up, I mean that you could see a financial way forward,
• 1:28
  that it could be sustainable and to do that it needed to be also um good enough on track as well and you're not necessarily winning but it had to be competitive so uh yes there was you know really needed to see by the end of 2006 uh that we could set it up for the for the long haul or to be honest saying that i could probably um probably beyond us to succeed at this
• 1:56
  In 06, with Chassis 10, you win Bathurst on an unbelievably emotional day for Craig Lowndes.
• 2:05
  It wasn't long after he'd said goodbye to Peter Brock and it was huge for the sport.
• 2:10
  You've kept that car.
• 2:13
  What did that mean to you?
• 2:15
  RD has a thing about everything's for sale.
• 2:17
  Would you ever really part with chassis 10?
• 2:20
  Yeah, of course I would.
• 2:25
  The only proviso is that, like some of the other cars that we've sold, I'd like it, if I do sell it at some point,
• 2:35
  I'd like it to go to somebody who keeps it properly, is prepared to roll it out at the right time.
• 2:44
  Scotty Taylor, for instance, has got two of our Bathurst winning cars.
• 2:47
  And I know that if supercars or somebody has got the right thing and wants to borrow them and make sure they're running properly, they'll always be ready to go from his point of view.
• 2:57
  He loves them and will always look after them properly.
• 3:01
  I mean, the right person that makes them live.
• 3:03
  Yeah, I mean, the Grove family have just bought the Sandman that we built in 2014.
• 3:10
  And they'll keep it beautifully as well.
• 3:13
  You know, that's a little bit of, to me, that car's a bit of art.
• 3:17
  It's a bit special.
• 3:19
  And so it's good for it to have a good home.
• 3:21
  But yeah, no, everything's for sale.
• 3:24
  You can't be a car dealer at some stage and not preach that.
• 3:30
  The championships and Bathurst, people always say, what do you favour more and things like that?
• 3:34
  I mean, your record, which we'll get to in a second, is remarkable what you've achieved in both spaces.
• 3:39
  But I sense in you a little more, just a fraction more maybe, intensity around Bathurst.
• 3:45
  The love of winning there really does mean a lot to you.
• 3:49
  It does mean a lot.
• 3:50
  Yeah, I mean, people who compete at Le Mans must feel the same way.
• 3:56
  I know that people, certainly in the old days, in F1, getting a good result at Monaco, even it could be a prick of a place to race at, to work at, everything else, but they still wanted to have a great result there.
• 4:12
  So, and in touring car land, really, there are...
• 4:18
  there are two big things, which was Spa and Bathurst, back in the European touring car days in the 80s, when there were some big events in Europe.
• 4:32
  And so to me, Bathurst is still the pinnacle of Australian racing and the most important thing that we do.
• 4:46
  Jamie kept a car.
• 4:47
  He bought it off you.
• 4:49
  Affectionately called Kate.
• 4:50
  He talked about it in the podcast.
• 4:51
  I think it was title winner 11 and 12.
• 4:53
  It's had an amazing run, an amazing record.
• 4:56
  Did you cut him a good deal?
• 4:59
  I did.
• 5:01
  I cut him a very good deal as part of his contract renewal at the time.
• 5:08
  No, Jamie got a good deal.
• 5:09
  On the other hand, he then did spend plenty of money to put it back to exactly how he wanted it and to make it so that it was immaculate, which it still is today.
• 5:24
  What he's achieved in the supercars history books may never be beaten.
• 5:29
  He's done some incredible things.
• 5:33
  On paper, at the time when you took him on board, many people probably would have said, no, his career and life could have gone a very different direction.
• 5:41
  What was it that you, because you're good with people, RD, and you clearly can see things, what did you see in him?
• 5:46
  What was the convincing moment where you went, I'm going to give this guy a go?
• 5:51
  Well, you've got to put it into context at the time.
• 5:54
  At the latter part of 2005, during 2005, we'd had Craig on board since the beginning of the year, and that had been a massive part of the transformation of the team, having him buy into the dream and then having him start winning races in May 2005 with us.
• 6:16
  And it was a massive driver for everyone in the team.
• 6:20
  So we had a...
• 6:23
  The other driver was Stephen Ellery that year.
• 6:25
  And he was a lovely bloke, but was never going to set the world on fire.
• 6:32
  And I had to do something to try and put together a crew that would win Bathurst.
• 6:40
  And so...
• 6:43
  Not everyone, but a lot of people used to pair their drivers up in those days.
• 6:48
  So I wanted somebody who was really good to put with Craig, but who also would be a young Australasian driver who would appeal to the local market, who would be half a generation younger than Craig.
• 7:08
  with potential so and I spoke to there were three people on the shortlist you know there was Frosty there was Davo Will Davison and Jamie and to be honest the one who jumped the hardest highest fastest to try and do something was Jamie yeah he was I think he thought it was a
• 7:33
  a wind-up when he got a phone call from me.
• 7:37
  But he was driving that year in 05 for another very good friend of mine, Tim Miles, and...
• 7:49
  But he was out of a drive at the end of the year.
• 7:51
  So, yeah, he knew that.
• 7:54
  I think Murph was coming in the following year or whatever.
• 7:57
  So he, yeah, couldn't go on a plane fast enough to come up.
• 8:03
  And he didn't care, or he said he didn't care, about the money.
• 8:09
  so i didn't pay him very much if he didn't care about it uh so he was really willing and able and he and but we had been particularly impressed by his driving in the two enduros that both at sandown and at bathurst with jason richards um he'd done exactly what he was asked to do at those races so and we needed somebody who could do that then um
• 8:36
  I think it was in December that year we had a test.
• 8:39
  There was obviously much more testing allowed then.
• 8:41
  We had a test day.
• 8:43
  Jamie came up, drove the car at Queensland Raceway.
• 8:48
  And to be honest, within 10 laps, we were looking at his brake tracers and saying, this guy's going to be special.
• 8:56
  He needed to lose a bit of weight and get fitter, but he was going to be special.
• 9:02
  He gets a little bit of a hard time in social media land, which I think is wrong.
• 9:06
  That's probably Aussie tall poppy syndrome, knowing what he's achieved.
• 9:11
  When he came on board, not just those traces that you're talking about there, his work ethic was pretty impressive too, wasn't it?
• 9:18
  Well, Jamie's success has been built around his work ethic.
• 9:23
  His work ethic,
• 9:25
  He's not a driver that can just get in the car, go flat out, and then go and do something else and win.
• 9:34
  That's not Jamie's methodology.
• 9:37
  I don't want to take anything away from his natural talent because it's huge.
• 9:40
  But his success at the very top level and why he's won, I don't know what it is, 120 races odd now in supercars is because he works hard at it.
• 9:52
  So he wants to know what's going on.
• 9:54
  He wants to understand it.
• 9:56
  He wants to prepare himself properly.
• 9:59
  He wants to put himself in the right mental position.
• 10:03
  frame of mind uh before he gets in the in the car so you know his his preparations have developed and developed over the years uh because he's he's seen a reward for it you know he's he's done better as a result of it so he's worked harder i i suspect than any other driver in pit lane uh for the success he's had but the success has come because he has worked so hard
• 10:31
  You mentioned Craig Lowndes there and then, you know, covered off Jamie Winkup.
• 10:35
  In the front line piece of the puzzle, the other one now, as we talk here, is Shane Van Gisbergen.
• 10:41
  From what I witnessed in Adelaide, he's a leaner, Shane Van Gisbergen.
• 10:45
  He's a guy that properly loves driving, knows the history of the sport in detail in many ways.
• 10:55
  Has he kind of clicked it up a gear in terms of commitment another level in 2020?
• 11:02
  Yes, I think he has is the short answer to that.
• 11:05
  Shane has come into the year with more committed to the preparation side and looking after himself, etc.
• 11:15
  He's realized he's 30 years old now and the sort of natural fitness you have when you're 20 years old.
• 11:22
  suddenly you've got to work harder to maintain it when you're 30.
• 11:25
  And that's just part of growing up.
• 11:27
  We've all been through that, et cetera.
• 11:30
  So he's done that.
• 11:31
  But he's also, the last few years, since he's been with Triple Eight, Shane has got more confident.
• 11:46
  a little bit less shy.
• 11:47
  It doesn't mean that he's not shy still.
• 11:49
  He is sometimes, but he is more confident.
• 11:52
  He is better at handling people.
• 11:57
  But he's also got more confident in his own ability, and rightly so.
• 12:04
  his, if he, if he wasn't, um, uh, one of the top three drivers in the category, he'd be the top data man in the category.
• 12:14
  His, his understanding of data, his reading of data, the way he processes, et cetera.
• 12:20
  And then his ability to explain it to a third party, you know, be that an amateur driver or a young driver or whatever is, um, is superb.
• 12:30
  Um,
• 12:31
  As it happens, his data engineer, Martin Short, who's yet another Kiwi, there's a lot of you, but Martin was a very good Formula Ford racer, but is also very good at data.
• 12:45
  Martin's claim to fame is he beat Scotty McLachlan back in the day.
• 12:49
  And so I think that's the screensaver on Shane's laptop.
• 12:55
  But he...
• 12:58
  Shane has got a massively high level of understanding of the data side of the sport.
• 13:08
  The other big piece of the puzzle of your success story is people, team.
• 13:15
  888 staff retention is unbelievable.
• 13:19
  It's a real strength.
• 13:20
  You are big on embracing families, your staff.
• 13:27
  You want the family to buy in because it's long hours, it's hard for the team, and so you really do put your arm around the families, don't you?
• 13:36
  I try to.
• 13:38
  I try to look after the people.
• 13:41
  I mean, yeah, one of my mantras in business is to look after the good people and piss off the bad people.
• 13:50
  All the people who don't fit in.
• 13:52
  And now every so often I get that wrong, but only the liars...
• 13:57
  don't get it wrong sometimes, but they certainly try to look after the good people.
• 14:04
  We have got some very good people.
• 14:06
  If I see every so often over the years I see a little bit of culture developing that
• 14:14
  Even good people who've been around too long or they need a change of environment or you need to step it up a bit or somebody who's come in who's caused a bit of angst in the team, etc.
• 14:23
  You have to be able to be prepared to flush that out.
• 14:26
  And there have been a few times over the years when I've done that.
• 14:30
  to try and protect the longevity at the top of the sport, of the success and being continually at the top level.
• 14:42
  I've had to do that sometimes to ensure that I think the culture is correct.
• 14:49
  That leads my natural line of questioning to loyalty.
• 14:54
  That's one of your core values.
• 14:55
  I know that.
• 14:57
  I believe in balance, so I'll get Ludo's side at another time.
• 15:00
  I'm talking to you here now.
• 15:01
  But Ludo Lacroix was with you for a really long time on the engineering side.
• 15:06
  He went off and joined your fierce rival in Pit Lane in Penske.
• 15:11
  I don't need to know the backstory about that so much.
• 15:13
  I just want to understand...
• 15:16
  how you must have taken that, because I would imagine that would have wounded you pretty significantly.
• 15:25
  basically I had no problem with Ludo going off and working for anyone else.
• 15:30
  But the reality is that the only thing that I really still feel deeply about with Ludo is the way he left, not the fact he left.
• 15:41
  And the great thing was that he then created the space by leaving Ludo
• 15:48
  for other people who felt there was a bit of a glass ceiling, which there was in many ways, to then step up.
• 15:56
  And one of the reasons Jeremy left, Jeremy Moore left, was because he couldn't go any further with us.
• 16:05
  Then he went off to Porsche and achieved a great deal and has now come back in a different capacity with a massively improved skill level.
• 16:14
  Now, since he's gone, we've had lots of chats.
• 16:18
  Yeah, we ended up famously in 2017, so the first race meeting.
• 16:25
  first race meeting of the year, Adelaide, and got onto the plane on Sunday night to fly back to Brisbane.
• 16:32
  And I was sitting in, yeah, whatever it was, 12A or something.
• 16:36
  And Ludo's come down, got on, and he suddenly realised he's sitting next to me.
• 16:42
  And he's looked a bit bewildered and then plonked himself down in 12B, et cetera.
• 16:49
  And we had a good chat, right?
• 16:51
  So...
• 16:53
  You know, I'll never forget the way he left, but we had a good chat, et cetera, and we've had plenty of chats since.
• 17:01
  I want to share a yarn with some people.
• 17:04
  You know, in fan land, some have this perception of you as dark overlord, controlling figure, but...
• 17:13
  There's a side and a yarn that they probably don't know.
• 17:16
  Tim Miles, who you've talked about in the podcast here, who years later would become part of Triple Eight, he tells me you made a presentation to the Supercars board to change the distribution of prize money.
• 17:28
  You'll be able to tell me the numbers.
• 17:29
  I don't know the percentages here.
• 17:31
  But you effectively wanted something more equitable for everyone down the grid.
• 17:35
  A Gordon Gekko would probably say, you're mad, don't do that because you're taking money out of your own pocket.
• 17:41
  Just explain that yarn and what you did.
• 17:43
  Yeah, it was back GFC time 2008, and we were all extremely concerned as team owners, as supercars, about what the effect would be on the...
• 18:01
  Australian economy and how it impacts on our world.
• 18:08
  We didn't know at that point that there would be a massive Chinese stimulus which would revitalise the mining sector in Australia, that Kevin Rudd would give everyone a flat screen TV or whatever, and all these things would roll out.
• 18:20
  We didn't know that.
• 18:21
  So we were very concerned about it.
• 18:23
  We looked hard at the
• 18:26
  at cutting some costs, which we did.
• 18:27
  You know, we had, for instance, we brought in the limitation number of people you take to races, did some things around that which have stood the test of time.
• 18:36
  We set down the parameters for mid-2010 to introduce the control camshaft, which saved a lot of money in engine land.
• 18:45
  So, but I presented something which basically took the revenue that the teams got, so...
• 18:53
  for argument's sake, if the teams were splitting at that time, $15 million, for instance, between us, that was split 80-20.
• 19:03
  So it was actually...
• 19:07
  80% was appearance money and 20% was prize money.
• 19:10
  But the prize money was massively biased towards the first two or three cars finishing order for each race.
• 19:20
  And I said, this is inequitable going forward.
• 19:27
  Because a year before that, I'd come up with a plan to get rid of the Level 2 licenses and bring everyone up to the same level.
• 19:36
  Because it was a massive bone of contention.
• 19:39
  And as part of that, Ross Stone and I had finally put the Nemo case to bed.
• 19:46
  just by the simple tactic of having lunch with Terry and Paul at, um, at the winery at Syramay.
• 19:53
  Um, and we put it to bed.
• 19:55
  Then we dealt with the, um, the level one, level two issue.
• 19:59
  And now in, in 2008, uh, we dealt with on the back of the paper, I put up to actually the team owners as a group.
• 20:10
  Uh, we, we,
• 20:12
  dealt with the distribution in a way which, to be honest, hurt two teams the most at that stage.
• 20:20
  By 2008, the people who were winning more races than anyone else was HSV stroke HRT at the time and us.
• 20:33
  And I had to persuade, to be honest, Craig Wilson, who was at Walkinshaws at the time, that this was a good thing.
• 20:43
  But he agreed, et cetera.
• 20:45
  And so we all signed up to a distribution system that we have today.
• 20:49
  And it did take money out of our pockets, took many hundreds of thousands of dollars out of Triple H's pockets, but it provided a better framework for the teams going forward.
• 21:01
  The next part of the, you know, showing a little bit of that side to you is the fact that when supercars were sold to Archer Capital, that whole thing almost became a full-time job for you, didn't it, in ensuring lots of things were in place and right for the sport going forward.
• 21:20
  Am I correct there?
• 21:21
  Yeah.
• 21:21
  I mean, if you roll back, middle of 2010, Tony Cochran had come to, Ross Stone and I,
• 21:30
  And said to us, look, there are real problems within SEL.
• 21:37
  And honestly, we needed to try and come up with a solution where we could sell down some or all of the sport or whatever and give SEL an exit probably from the sport.
• 21:52
  So Tony had a few ideas about it but didn't come to anything.
• 21:57
  Then I thought, well, maybe we can bring in another party.
• 22:04
  Not quite sure how to do it.
• 22:05
  So I went and sat down with Tim, who by that stage was no longer a team owner.
• 22:10
  So he was literally arm's length and explained the problem to him in September, etc.
• 22:16
  And we went and sat down with the private equity guy who, as it happens, was part of Archer.
• 22:22
  But they weren't only because Tim knew him well enough to go and have a chat, loose chat about this.
• 22:30
  And came up with a formula that we thought we could then we could sell down a part of the team's interest.
• 22:40
  enable SEL to exit.
• 22:46
  and help us fund changing the cars to the car of the future for 2013 as well as teams.
• 22:57
  And we came up with a formula that Tim and I put to the teams on the Monday after the Gold Coast in 2010.
• 23:06
  We then embarked, having got everyone on board and...
• 23:13
  some of them didn't believe it could ever be done but they agreed to come along and see if we could do this but then we embarked on a six month period really of six, seven months a huge amount of work now obviously we've
• 23:31
  Tim and one of his off-siders, Stephen Bowering, did.
• 23:35
  They did an awful lot of the work, but they still relied on somebody on our side all the time.
• 23:42
  And that's really...
• 23:45
  I could only do that because at the end of 2010, Adrian Burgess came.
• 23:51
  to work for me at 888.
• 23:54
  So that enabled me from the beginning of January 2011, which is when the process really started to happen on the sale side of it, yeah, to get involved with it.
• 24:04
  And literally, that was St Ford's from Sydney every week.
• 24:09
  And...
• 24:12
  rewriting the constitution rewriting the racing entitlements contract rewriting coming up with the the commission uh concept then you're putting all these things together uh during that period through till the end of uh the end of may and and managing the um the sel side of it um particularly with um
• 24:37
  with David Coe, who died in 2013, but David was a part of SEL.
• 24:44
  And he was a non-executive part of SEL, but he handled their interaction with Tim and myself most of the time.
• 25:13
  Common causes for understeer.
• 25:15
  Front wheel drive, high cornering speed.
• 25:18
  But the most common, forgetting that you're not in a rear wheel drive car.
• 25:24
  When Craig Lowndes ultimately stopped racing full time, it's great that he's still doing enduro stuff with you now.
• 25:30
  There was all this talk, this rumor about Simona DeSalvestro, that she might join you guys and perhaps your daughter, Jess Dane, might have a significant role in that particular team and so on.
• 25:39
  How close did that get?
• 25:41
  Why did it perhaps not come to pass?
• 25:43
  Yeah, it got pretty close in August.
• 25:48
  When would that have been?
• 25:49
  August 2018.
• 25:50
  It didn't happen because I'd set a deadline for the funding to be in place by a certain time.
• 26:03
  And I'd set the deadline and I said to everyone concerned, if it isn't done by then, I'm not going to do it.
• 26:09
  And so I didn't want to be hanging on, hanging on, and then compromising the thing.
• 26:14
  We'd had a really good three years with Craig as the third car, and I'd always said the only person I'd run third car for was Craig.
• 26:27
  There had to be a really good reason for...
• 26:31
  And Simona could have been that good reason, but it had to be a really good reason, well-funded, et cetera, for us to do it.
• 26:41
  And unfortunately, it just didn't come to pass.
• 26:47
  Maybe several people didn't believe me in terms of having a deadline, but I had a deadline.
• 26:51
  And that's the way you have to do business if you're going to prepare yourself.
• 26:57
  Because if it wasn't going to happen,
• 26:59
  I need to do some other things.
• 27:01
  That's the issue.
• 27:02
  So I wanted to make sure that we were properly prepared going into the 2019 season.
• 27:12
  You talked about 2019 there a moment ago.
• 27:14
  Let's, you know, in the latter part of last year, early part of this year, supercars has worked to improve the technical parity between Commodore and Mustang.
• 27:26
  At what point last year did you realise that Mustang had an edge and where were you when that happened?
• 27:33
  Well, at the end of 2018, there was an aero test and, you know, V-Cat, as they're called, and the other side had turned up with a car that was just so radically different from anything that had been done before.
• 27:48
  Yeah, we knew we were on the back foot.
• 27:51
  And, but because...
• 27:54
  Because supercars as a category had never been placed in this position, or certainly in the 16 years that I'd been around,
• 28:04
  then I didn't really know how to deal with it.
• 28:07
  So, which is totally different from how the landscape had been for the Ford versus Holden fight all the time I'd been in Australia.
• 28:16
  There'd been, yeah, I'd never say there hadn't been differences, but it had been so small that other things had been more important.
• 28:25
  Yeah, the team, the driver, et cetera, et cetera.
• 28:28
  So it was a rude shock to the system.
• 28:34
  It was a rude shock to supercars and the teams that we suddenly had this inequity.
• 28:41
  Now, to their credit, they dealt with the center of gravity problem straight away.
• 28:49
  And we'd been asking and asking and asking and asking, but they dealt with it as quickly as they practically could.
• 28:58
  The aero side was more complicated and we had a couple of false dawns, but we knew what needed to be done to put us in the same ballpark.
• 29:09
  And we'd even gone to the aero test at the beginning of December in 2018 and...
• 29:16
  With the gurney that we then ran later in the year, we'd gone with it.
• 29:20
  We hadn't ever tested it, but we'd gone with it because we'd said to supercars, we should have this in the toolbox in case we need it, having looked at the Mustang at Queensland Raceway, you know, pictures of it.
• 29:32
  We should go there with that.
• 29:34
  Well, that's exactly the part that went on the car in Pukekohe.
• 29:39
  And when we put it on Pukekohe, we'd never ever had it on a car before.
• 29:44
  But we thought that might be the fix for what we needed, and it certainly put us back in the ballpark.
• 29:52
  But the politics along the way, to be honest, almost destroyed the sport.
• 30:00
  You've talked about pictures at Queensland Raceway there.
• 30:02
  For a driver, when you're at 200-plus kilometres an hour, a lot of things slow down for them.
• 30:08
  Is it urban myth that someone, a driver, could see the behaviour of the Mustang rear wing relative to its rear window and got on the radio and howled about it?
• 30:20
  Is that true or is that rubbish?
• 30:22
  I want to put that into context because...
• 30:25
  what we call the DRS effect of wings changing.
• 30:29
  And that's been going on for a few years.
• 30:31
  And it's not exclusive to the Mustang.
• 30:34
  So supercars have quite rightly have tried to, and I think probably have succeeded, in stopping too much flex going on in the rear wing.
• 30:46
  Wow.
• 30:46
  But basically for the last, probably the last five years or so, five or six years, people have been trying to get the rear wing to flex by various means to try and reduce, effectively reduce the angle of attack of the rear wing down the straight.
• 31:04
  So what was going on with...
• 31:07
  one or two of the mustangs last year in that sense it wasn't as though other people hadn't been trying to do it as well they they had been um because it wasn't it wasn't properly ruled around yeah there was a naivety somewhere um that teams took a teams took advantage of uh and we were told there'd be rules coming in around it but then they didn't really come in at all until this year
• 31:31
  you've spoken quite positively.
• 31:32
  We're only one round in as we chat here, but you feel like things are better, that things are closer, more correct in that department?
• 31:41
  I think they probably are.
• 31:42
  I think Adelaide's not really an aero track, but there's still aero, still important.
• 31:49
  Yeah.
• 31:50
  Yeah, we've run the figures.
• 31:51
  Supercars have run the figures in terms of parity between the two makes of car.
• 31:56
  There's now, there's eight Mustangs, which is a good thing, if you like, to be able to run a model of two against two, four against four, six against six, et cetera.
• 32:07
  And they're all, all those results pop out figures that are massively within what we would regard as parity in the sport.
• 32:16
  So it does look good.
• 32:18
  at the moment.
• 32:19
  Hopefully it stays that way.
• 32:22
  What supercars did at the end of last year with the two aero tests, not one, but two, was not only technically better, but it was also the second one, especially, was conducted with total transparency.
• 32:42
  And in doing that,
• 32:45
  it then meant that you had proper backup from the teams in the brain department.
• 32:52
  Yeah, there's some good brains there on both sides.
• 32:55
  So they could both cross-examine the data.
• 32:59
  And in fact, in January, the test there was massively important.
• 33:04
  Let's, before we get to the finish, punch through some car stuff.
• 33:08
  Robin Reliant, as he's known on socials, has a Reliant Robin three-wheeler.
• 33:13
  Tell us about that.
• 33:18
  I bought one of it, I can't remember, about five years ago or something, etc.
• 33:23
  I thought it would be fun to have one over.
• 33:24
  Was it Top Gear that prompted you?
• 33:26
  Why did you want to do that?
• 33:28
  It probably was, watching that famous skit with Clarkson and co.
• 33:34
  But I...
• 33:37
  I thought we needed a bit of entertainment at Norwell.
• 33:41
  And so, and I'd also bought an entire set of Pirelli calendars at an auction in London.
• 33:53
  So I thought, oh, there's a big pile of these bloody calendars and everything.
• 33:56
  Maybe I should have put them in a car and sent it over.
• 33:59
  So I bought a...
• 34:01
  what was then quite a good condition, Reliant Robin, and put the calendars in the back and sent them over.
• 34:10
  And that, when it arrived, whenever it was, it must be four years ago now or something, and so I took it down to Paul's and said...
• 34:24
  could you put a half cage in it so it's a little bit safer and a window net or something and Paul said yeah yeah we can do that no problem but let's take it for a spin so he and I spent I think it was a Saturday morning and we pissed ourselves laughing and then Gary Holt rolled up because he was just passing
• 34:45
  And had a go as well.
• 34:47
  And I think Paul's girlfriend, Karina, has got some footage or something of that morning.
• 34:54
  It was one of the funniest mornings I've ever had.
• 34:57
  And since then, I mean, the car's been on its side, I don't know how many times, but many, many times around Norwell.
• 35:05
  And we've had a lot of fun with it.
• 35:07
  I love it.
• 35:07
  You're talking about the dude, Paul Morris, who has been a guest on the podcast before, who is probably responsible for the tattoo that you now bear.
• 35:13
  You did a great road trip with him.
• 35:16
  What was it in a...
• 35:16
  It was an old American cop car, I think, wasn't it?
• 35:19
  And you cruised to Texas or something.
• 35:21
  What did you do?
• 35:23
  Yeah, when we did that race in Texas, you remember, in May 2013, and Paul and I said, well, we're going to have some fun along the way.
• 35:31
  So we...
• 35:35
  decided that we needed an old police car to drive across America, you know, from L.A. to Austin.
• 35:44
  And that would be our road trip.
• 35:46
  So he rang up, Boris said, and Boris has a BMW dealership outside San Diego.
• 35:52
  um so he's somewhere a car dealer so uh paul said can you get us one and boris yeah i said yeah i've just bought one for you crown victoria um with a big engine and everything etc um and you know washington state police car or something uh two and a half thousand dollars perfect okay so so we rolled over there
• 36:15
  picked that up and drove to Vegas.
• 36:21
  We can't remember what happened, but we were very poor when we left the next day and very ill.
• 36:26
  I think we made the mistake of ringing Mick Doohan on the way to ask Mick where we should go, and then that screwed us.
• 36:33
  So we ended up quite ill, and then we drove through...
• 36:42
  um el paso etc you know all the way to to to austin in that car um and i think the the car was last seen paul then drove it to to dale earnhardt junior's house or something in charlotte around there and left it there i love it you are a bit of a life of the party i know that when you when you get going you did something for me a few years ago which i treasure we went to norwell there the motorplex between gold coast and and brisbane which paul morris owns and runs
• 37:11
  You had a day where you let a few of us sample some machinery.
• 37:14
  So I got to drive at the time a Red Bull Commodore of Craig Lowndes.
• 37:19
  One of my buddies in television, actually, a producer, Michael Heaton, I think he thought he was going to be the last of the late breakers and went off at the back straight.
• 37:26
  I've never seen you run so fast in my life, which was awesome.
• 37:31
  But separately, you let me drive a Camaro that you've got.
• 37:34
  And it's a pretty rare beast from memory, a rare right-hand driver.
• 37:37
  Has it got some Andy Rouse heritage or something too?
• 37:39
  Tell me about that.
• 37:40
  Yeah, so that car is one of, I think, three right-hand drive shells that were built by Fisher in 1967 in Canada.
• 37:52
  And I've got two of them.
• 37:54
  One's a road car in the UK that I've got that, to be honest, is a complete bit of shit.
• 37:59
  It drives diabolically badly, but it was used in a Fast and Furious film a few years ago.
• 38:07
  And the blue one was built into a race car by Andy Rouse in the early mid-'90s for a sponsor of his called Pete Hall.
• 38:19
  And Pete Hall had a company called ICS, which was quite a famous sponsor on Andy's Sierra... Yeah, exactly, correct.
• 38:28
  So, and Pete owned the car for many years and was selling it about 10 or 12 years ago or something and I bought it and bought it out here.
• 38:38
  I love it.
• 38:39
  I love the way the car looks.
• 38:40
  I think it's the best looking Camaro that there's been.
• 38:44
  The car is incredibly simple as a race car, but lots of power.
• 38:50
  Kenny Max made sure it's got plenty of grunt.
• 38:54
  It's pretty light, et cetera, and it goes like stink, and I enjoy using it at mucking around at Norwell.
• 39:05
  You can't go that fast, but it makes a beautiful noise.
• 39:09
  So, yeah, I've got that and a few other things that are really just to play with.
• 39:16
  The final two in that that I'd like to cover if you're comfortable with it, one of them you shared, I think, recently on social media, Opelmanter.
• 39:22
  What did you – I mean, is that got a rally background?
• 39:25
  What's the heritage on that thing?
• 39:28
  An Irish farmer had it.
• 39:32
  in his shed.
• 39:33
  And his Opal mantas, yeah, they're like four capris in the 70s, early 80s and everything.
• 39:40
  And it just was quite a well-built two-litre manta.
• 39:45
  And so I bought it, I can't remember, four years ago or something off this farmer, brought it out here.
• 39:50
  We've had some fun with it out here and every so often take it for a run.
• 39:56
  But to me, these things need to be fun
• 40:01
  I've got a Subaru WRX STI two-door that Shane has tried his best to hammer the guts out of and drive it around Norwell without using the brakes because he just throws it sideways everywhere.
• 40:15
  But that's an awesome car, great fun.
• 40:18
  I've got an Jaguar XJS Group A car that I just bought in Christchurch a few months ago.
• 40:26
  It's now in Australia that Angus Fogg,
• 40:30
  has been looking after the last few years now white one um and the other day i bought a um an audi uh quattro sport um short wheelbase yeah um that'll come out here soon so have some fun with
• 40:45
  I love it.
• 40:46
  I love it.
• 40:47
  We can't wrap up this conversation, RD, without discussing Holden.
• 40:51
  Some of it, because it's so fresh in everyone's minds, you may not be able to tell us, which is fine.
• 40:55
  Were you shocked about the sudden nature of GM's decision to turn out the lights, to retire the brand, to close Holden down?
• 41:03
  Not a lot of people, I mean, I think people thought the day would come, but maybe not as fast as it did.
• 41:10
  Yeah, I mean, I was surprised by the timing.
• 41:15
  I thought that there was going to be a possibility of this happening at some stage because of the retreat from right-hand drive markets around the world.
• 41:25
  But I thought that the Australian business model was going to be given a bit longer to show that it would work or not work.
• 41:33
  Unfortunately, just at the end of the day,
• 41:37
  If you're not producing right-hand drive cars for anywhere but Australia, New Zealand and Thailand, it doesn't give you a very big market.
• 41:47
  So whilst it was a bit of a shock timing-wise, yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, you could see it being a distinct possibility at some stage, right?
• 42:03
  It's disappointing and sad, very sad, to see the back of the brand in this country.
• 42:10
  But, yeah, that's life.
• 42:12
  There have been plenty of other brands that have died over the years.
• 42:16
  History's full of car brands and motor racing brands that have come and gone, very successful ones.
• 42:22
  And the heritage of Holden is unbelievable and it's part of...
• 42:30
  Australian history for everyone not just motor racing but the end of the day it didn't stack up what's the future hold in your mind for two-prong question firstly let's go let's go supercars there's you know discussion about about you know fast tracking gen 3 regulations and things like that what in a perfect world do you think supercars would or should become
• 42:53
  Well, it's a really hard environment at the moment, not putting aside the Holden thing, it's a really hard environment at the moment to really try and second guess what's going on in the world, automatically right now.
• 43:12
  Are we all going to be driving electric cars?
• 43:14
  Are we all going to be hybrid?
• 43:17
  You know, where's it going?
• 43:20
  So at the end of the day, the direction is probably trying to say, look, we're entertainment.
• 43:29
  We love the big, raucous cars that we've got.
• 43:35
  How can we best take that forward and say the next few years, honestly, if you want to go off and buy an electric car to drive around town, do it.
• 43:45
  But that's not supercars.
• 43:47
  supercars we need to to stick to our dna for the foreseeable future um we need to be prepared to encompass what are particularly halo cars today you know in terms of okay maybe they're two-door cars because four-door cars are seen as just uber these days uh maybe we've got to embrace
• 44:17
  we were built on the fan base that does love internal combustion engines and i think we've forgotten to tell the story in the last few years of the fact that we are running a renewable fuel 85 percent ethanol in our cars which to be honest sugar in
• 44:40
  Queensland is almost a weed these days.
• 44:43
  People don't want to put in soft drinks or whatever.
• 44:47
  So we should actually be promoting, not just as supercars, but as a country, we should be doing a much better job of using one of the most renewable fuels there is.
• 44:58
  in it with ethanol.
• 45:01
  So I don't think we have to justify our position if we stick to our guns and provide great entertainment with loud cars, fast cars, that people at the end of the day want to want to come and see.
• 45:19
  The fact is that
• 45:21
  people have stopped using horses to go to work, but they spend more money on horses today than they ever have done in history.
• 45:27
  They've stopped using sailboats to go and catch fish or come from the UK to Australia.
• 45:34
  But people still spend a fortune on sailboats, right?
• 45:38
  So there's a place for us going forward and having fun and people enjoying it and being prepared to pay us, and we shouldn't be shy about it.
• 45:51
  The final part is what I feel or perhaps see as a little thought towards succession planning at your company.
• 45:59
  And we've seen Paul Dumbrell come on board.
• 46:01
  We've seen Jamie Wincup take a stake in it.
• 46:03
  We've mentioned Tim Miles during this discussion as well.
• 46:07
  I mean, your own daughter is clearly doing things that might one day see her take a key role there too.
• 46:12
  She's already doing some amazing things for the company.
• 46:15
  What do you see Triple Eight becoming in the years ahead?
• 46:18
  What would you like it to be?
• 46:20
  Well, I'd certainly like to have somebody competent to take it over from me in terms of running it day to day.
• 46:30
  And I would be very, very happy if Jamie was that person, because I think he's improving...
• 46:42
  from a non-driving point of view at a massive rate at the moment and has got the potential to do the job.
• 46:52
  I've also got to remember there's an extraordinarily capable group of people, many of whom have worked for me for a long time,
• 47:00
  just below the surface, if you like, in terms of Mark Dutton, in terms of Nuri Patterson, who's the CFO, in terms of Jeremy Moore now back, in terms of Tom Wilson, Chris Goose and Andrew Simpson.
• 47:17
  Those people are, yeah, they're hardcore triple-A people.
• 47:23
  And many of them work together
• 47:26
  worked that well some all the time I've been in Australia so they need the direction of somebody and Jamie is capable of being that person by the same token
• 47:43
  Yeah, I think there's a role somewhere in there if she wants it for Jessica.
• 47:49
  But A, she's got to want it, and B, it's got to fit in with everyone else.
• 47:56
  So I'm not going to try to...
• 47:59
  steer her in any direction it's up to her to make the decision does she yeah once in two years time she'll be a lawyer as well as a as well as a journalist as it were in terms of her her abilities um and so if she wants to go and use those skills somewhere else in the in the world let alone the motorsport world um then i'm not going to um
• 48:23
  provide any impediment to that whatsoever.
• 48:26
  On the other hand, if she wants to stay around, and I can help her do that, I think one thing she does really like is our involvement in GTs.
• 48:38
  And I can see a point at which she may well play a much greater role in that side of the team, in that side of the business as it develops.
• 48:53
  I mean, that's developing pretty well at the moment.
• 48:56
  Congratulations on everything that you've achieved.
• 49:00
  Eight's a lucky number in Asia.
• 49:02
  Triple Eight is incredibly lucky, but you've made your own luck.
• 49:05
  You've worked hard with a number of great people, and I hope you've paused to, whether it's BTCC, what you've done here in Australia, paused to soak up a bit of that because it's a remarkable story, and I think we could cover a lot more of it here, but we've done the snapshot here.
• 49:19
  Well done.
• 49:20
  Yeah, thanks, Ross.
• 49:21
  It's been an honour not only to have done it, but also, you know, when I look at the people that you've had on here, etc.
• 49:29
  as well, some of them friends of mine, it's good to be included.
• 49:34
  Thanks very much.
• 49:41
  Rusty's Garage is written and presented by me, Greg Rust.
• 49:45
  Series producer and editor is Alex Mitchell.
• 49:49
  Audio production by Darcy Thompson.
• 49:57
  Listener.