Latest / Rusty's Garage / Ryan Walkinshaw (Part 1)

Transcript

Ryan Walkinshaw (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 the home studio for this episode.
• 0:28
  My guest is in Monaco.
• 0:30
  He splits his time between Europe and Australia, taking care of automotive and racing business interests.
• 0:37
  Ryan Walkinshaw is still buzzing after winning the 2021 Bathurst 1000.
• 0:43
  In many ways, he considers this one the first proper great race trophy that he's been a part of.
• 0:49
  His drivers, Chas Mostert and Lee Holdsworth and the Walkinshaw Andretti United crew were dialled in from the moment practice began at Mount Panorama last December.
• 0:58
  Now, this conversation is a little shorter than many of my recent pods.
• 1:03
  That's because he's just come back from holidays.
• 1:06
  Ryan actually messaged me on Christmas Eve and said, Hey, do you want to do this now?
• 1:11
  After a massive year for both of us, I thought it best to let him just enjoy his break.
• 1:15
  In Mexico, where he was staying at an exclusive hotel that was once owned by Pablo Escobar.
• 1:22
  He's gearing up for a cycle with mates as we prepare to record this, and that's important as he endeavours to improve his lungs after a serious battle with COVID.
• 1:31
  He opens up on that, the different management style he has compared to his late father Tom, and much more.
• 1:38
  You'll get a sense of the intelligent young business leader here who has dabbled successfully in cryptocurrency too, how competitive he is.
• 1:47
  how hungry he is to get back to number one in the supercars pit lane, and why the loss of Holden just made him more determined on both the automotive and racing side of the business.
• 1:58
  There is time for a bit of fun too.
• 2:00
  That's his personality.
• 2:01
  And we begin by talking about the crazy blonde hair he got to celebrate the great race.
• 2:08
  I'm now in that phase where I've got to either commit to getting it dyed again, blonde, or letting it grow out and looking terrible for about four or five months.
• 2:17
  I've managed to avoid chars giving me a hard time about not committing to the Mohawk as well.
• 2:22
  So I'm going to take this as a win because I think it could have been quite a big loss if I'd, if I'd gone full committed to the, to shaving the sides of the head and letting the top grow out and go all floppy.
• 2:32
  So yeah,
• 2:32
  And as you said before the podcast, Greg, it's not exactly a good aesthetic having a blonde, half blonde, half brown haired mohawk around here.
• 2:40
  It's quite rare.
• 2:42
  Yeah, quite rare for Monaco, I would imagine.
• 2:44
  Normally, Ryan, I start these chats with early live stuff and we may dabble with that later.
• 2:49
  But I really want to focus on the now and that is the wrap up of Bathurst.
• 2:54
  Now with a bit of time, winning in December 2021, achieving...
• 2:59
  that feat must have felt enormous in the whole comeback, fight back, etc.
• 3:04
  How did it feel?
• 3:05
  Yeah, pretty amazing.
• 3:07
  It kind of felt a bit surreal as we were sort of counting down the laps towards the end.
• 3:11
  And, you know, with sort of 10 laps to go, it was just going to get a little bit anxious because we just didn't know what was going to happen.
• 3:18
  We've lost the race before with Garth getting taken out by Scott McLaughlin when he probably was going to win it.
• 3:25
  I think we had about 11 to 12 laps to go in that race.
• 3:27
  So,
• 3:28
  We've seen so many other drivers as well lose it in the last stint.
• 3:33
  The anxiety sort of rose quite aggressively.
• 3:35
  And then obviously when we came over the finish line, Luffy grabbed me and said, come on mate, we've won, let's go clap it.
• 3:41
  And we sort of ran out and that's when it all sort of sunk in.
• 3:43
  And obviously everyone was very emotional.
• 3:45
  I'd won Bathurst the first year that my dad died.
• 3:49
  in all honesty, that was no effort for me.
• 3:51
  You know, I just sort of taken over and was still pretty wet behind the ears.
• 3:53
  That was still a victory, which was more of a hangover from what he did as opposed to what I did.
• 3:59
  So this was sort of what I feel was, you know, a lot more of what, you know, me and the team that we've built over the last few years, you know, really managed to achieve.
• 4:08
  So,
• 4:09
  Super, super emotional and excited and happy, but also incredibly proud of all the good people in our team.
• 4:16
  I know what they've been through.
• 4:17
  I know how much we've worked towards trying to achieve that.
• 4:23
  There's no better group of people in Pit Lane, no more deserving group of people in Pit Lane, in my opinion, to have won that weekend.
• 4:29
  What did Zac Brown say when you spoke to him after the race?
• 4:34
  He was pretty good.
• 4:35
  He was pretty excited, pretty happy.
• 4:37
  He was just casual.
• 4:38
  Zach was always very happy and then gave me a bit of shit to remind me that I shouldn't get a big head and all that sort of thing, as he normally does.
• 4:47
  And Michael as well was very, very happy and over the moon.
• 4:51
  One of our big things was that when we did this partnership, bringing Bathurst was a big thing we wanted to take off.
• 4:58
  It took a little bit longer than we hoped.
• 5:01
  We can thank COVID and the team going through a pretty tough time when mega fuels went bust halfway through the season, which puts so much of our plans behind where we wanted to be.
• 5:15
  Finally getting a Bathurst win was a big accomplishment for what we wanted to do together.
• 5:20
  And we've got two more left.
• 5:21
  One's team's championship and one's driver's championship.
• 5:24
  So it's one box ticked and two more to go.
• 5:26
  Lots of pieces of the puzzle were put into place
• 5:30
  well before December 2021, right?
• 5:33
  I think I read somewhere you talked about it being almost like a six-month process and probably even more than that where you targeted wanting to win that race.
• 5:42
  It's a race that can seesaw so much from an emotional point of view, from the rare things it often throws up.
• 5:52
  But all week, Ryan, that car, that outfit, you were just on it.
• 5:57
  You were tested though with that tyre issue and things like that.
• 6:01
  But by and large, it was a mighty week, mate, wasn't it?
• 6:04
  Yeah, it was one of those weeks where just everything was going our way and we were kind of wondering at what point we were going to chip over ourselves or something was going to come and smack us in the back of the head and remind us because that's what Bathurst does, right?
• 6:15
  It doesn't matter how fast you are, it doesn't matter how well you're driving, something will inevitably happen.
• 6:21
  It's the beauty of that race and also the curse of it.
• 6:24
  And, you know, we were pretty much fastest or top sort of three or four fastest in every practice session.
• 6:33
  And in all honesty, we did think we were going to be pretty quick.
• 6:35
  We didn't know we were going to have that much pace and have, you know, that good tire life and so on.
• 6:40
  But we were pretty confident we were going to be relatively fast there.
• 6:45
  And you're right, it was a lot of work that went on in the background for that race.
• 6:53
  It was more than a six-month process, but the last six months, we focused a lot of the work we were doing throughout the year.
• 7:01
  We focused just purely towards Bathurst and had to sacrifice a few bits and pieces in different races as well.
• 7:07
  You'll have noticed at Sydney Motorsport Park, we were a little bit up and down.
• 7:13
  Once we realised that that track was just not very suited to us, that's when we started refocusing the last two events there on Bathurst and what we wanted to try and understand from the car to support what we were doing back in Clayton and walk towards Bathurst as positively as we could do.
• 7:35
  The podcast is very much about people but also about significant machines.
• 7:40
  So you've sold the car.
• 7:43
  You've sold the car.
• 7:44
  Was it hard to do that in the wake of the win?
• 7:48
  And how much of a fight did kind of Zack put up?
• 7:51
  Because I gather he wanted to keep it.
• 7:53
  Is that correct?
• 7:54
  Well, we actually pre-sold the car.
• 7:55
  So in the US, it's not an unusual model, and it's one that Andretti used, where they actually pre-sold their cars.
• 8:04
  well before the season or when they first build them and the idea is that you get quick cash in now for the car, for the assets which the teams always want and a potential investor is buying a car for a certain amount of money that if it's successful will pretty rapidly increase in value and obviously this car had a pretty big win at Bathurst and the value has probably increased dramatically and
• 8:32
  And Zach messaged us and he was like, I want to buy that car.
• 8:34
  And I was like, sorry, dude, it's already sold.
• 8:38
  You know, that cash is already in the business and it's already been used.
• 8:43
  So he said, OK, we need to introduce me to the guy.
• 8:45
  We need to go and try and do a deal.
• 8:46
  So I actually don't know what's going on there.
• 8:48
  But knowing Zach, if if there is a deal on the table, he'll be he'll be he'll be flat out trying to trying to win it.
• 8:54
  So, yeah, I don't know what's going to happen there.
• 8:58
  Yeah, it's always one of those things, you know, a little bit of regret when you sell a car and it does well and the value increases and you can sell it for more.
• 9:05
  But in all honesty, we've got our model.
• 9:08
  It's how we run our business and we're pretty happy with it.
• 9:10
  And, you know, the exact point of what we do with pre-selling cars is exactly for that purpose.
• 9:15
  You know, an investor can come in and buy a car for a decent amount of money, but not too much.
• 9:20
  You know, fair and reasonable value for a new supercar.
• 9:23
  And, you know, he takes the risk going forward and also takes the rewards.
• 9:27
  So, you know, it will continue using that model going forward, even though sometimes it may hurt us a little bit when the success is pretty strong and the value probably increases quite a lot.
• 9:35
  Definitely.
• 9:36
  You brought up your late dad there a moment ago.
• 9:38
  I think he passed away, mate, if I'm right, 11 years ago, not long after the Bathurst win.
• 9:44
  What would he have made of that?
• 9:46
  What would he have thought of that?
• 9:47
  Because you have put your own moniker...
• 9:52
  It's a lot of people that are involved in this, obviously, not just you, but you have been able to put your own moniker on it, as you said before, on the business and then on this win.
• 10:00
  Yeah, and he would have probably done things a lot differently than I would have done when I first got involved.
• 10:07
  But there was a huge amount of shit that was thrown at us as a team, a lot of which I could talk about, a lot of which I can't, unfortunately.
• 10:15
  The team's been through a lot and you'll have seen first hand going through some of the big peaks and troughs that we've had over the last decade.
• 10:24
  That mountain was the first place my dad raced in Australia.
• 10:28
  It's what made him fall in love with Australian motorsport.
• 10:30
  And it was really the catalyst that drove him to set up the Holden Racing Team and Holden Special Vehicles and create what he did down here.
• 10:39
  So it's got a pretty important value in my family's life and our history.
• 10:43
  And it's something I've always wanted to continue.
• 10:45
  And it's something that I hope we can continue to build on going forward.
• 10:49
  You know, it's only a little mountain in the middle of New South Wales where a few cars go racing on every single year.
• 10:53
  But it's a pretty special mountain and it means a lot to my family.
• 10:56
  So, yeah, I think he would have been pretty happy and quite proud of what the team accomplished.
• 11:01
  Because, you know, he'll have also known if he was around, you know, a lot of the challenges that we went through to get there.
• 11:08
  Have you got a fond memory when you were growing up of, maybe some of them were even before your time, mate, of some of the cars that he raced at the mountain himself?
• 11:17
  I often think to some of the, you know, the early days of the Holden Racing Team.
• 11:22
  And then even, you know, for me, when you go and click on YouTube now and you find the Jaguar XJS, I mean, that thing is infectious.
• 11:29
  I was going to say that one.
• 11:31
  Tell me how you feel about that.
• 11:32
  Well, it's pretty cool, isn't it?
• 11:33
  And you're looking at him, you know, ragging the hell out of that thing across a mountain without any of the driver aids that a lot of racing drivers are used to these days.
• 11:43
  ...walking shore, working at the wheel through Toledo, turn across the top of the mountain.
• 11:48
  Now, Castrol and McPhilomay Park.
• 11:57
  Coming on to Skyline.
• 12:02
  And now dropping down towards the S's, spectacular part of the circuit, a hard working part of the circuit.
• 12:12
  And it's just awesome because, you know, that's the beauty of some of the old machines, is just how difficult they were to drive.
• 12:18
  And it is something that, you know, I think we've lost a little bit of in some of the machines that we drive these days.
• 12:23
  And you look at GT3, which I'm not saying they're easy, they're easy to drive, but they're a hell of a lot easier than driving those big old,
• 12:29
  those big old pigs up mountains.
• 12:31
  But when you look at the aesthetic of them, they're so beautiful as race cars as well, right?
• 12:35
  You know, they're really quite special to look at.
• 12:37
  I mean, you know how a challenge they wear to actually rag around a mountain like that and a track that's complicated and is technically challenging as Bathurst.
• 12:44
  It is pretty special.
• 12:45
  And, you know, seeing the video with my dad's old orange racing gloves, which he used to race,
• 12:50
  is always quite a good video to go and show people.
• 12:54
  When I try and explain what the mountain is, I show them to my friends over here who have no idea what Bathurst is.
• 12:59
  I would normally show them two videos, I normally show them that video of Dad and the Jag.
• 13:03
  And the video from, I think it was 2011, this mountain video that I think Seven did, which was a very, very, very cool video that I thought was quite an emotive and passionate way to describe what Bathurst is all about.
• 13:17
  And when they see those two videos, generally they sort of get it.
• 13:20
  What's the greatest lesson you reckon he taught you in the motor racing business?
• 13:24
  And what's the thing that you've done perhaps differently to your dad?
• 13:29
  Because, you know, the world, the motor racing landscape is different and it keeps evolving.
• 13:34
  We know that.
• 13:35
  What's the thing that you perhaps have done maybe a little bit differently?
• 13:40
  And what's the thing that he taught you that stands in your mind?
• 13:45
  Uh, me and my dad definitely run our businesses differently.
• 13:48
  Um, my dad was much more of a dictator in how he went about it.
• 13:51
  And, you know, and, and that can be very, very good.
• 13:54
  If you've got someone who is, who is as savvy as my father, um, you know, having that kind of, uh, heavy top-down management approach, um, can be very, very, uh, successful if done the right way.
• 14:05
  Um, it also means you've got one point of failure there, right?
• 14:08
  If, uh, if, if you've got that kind of model and, um,
• 14:10
  And, you know, my dad would probably be the first to say that, you know, there were some things that happened at TWR which probably could have been avoided if there were some better people around him that were, you know, not necessarily just guys that he could tell what to do, but had more of a sort of conducive and organic management style where everyone sort of worked together a little bit more.
• 14:32
  And I think that's what I've tried to do in our businesses, not just in the race team, but in the automotive business and the wider wall control group is, you know, one of my rules is never be the smartest guy in the room.
• 14:42
  Because otherwise, why am I paying for someone else to be there to try and be a specialist in one subject?
• 14:47
  and not being asked questions on things.
• 14:49
  And I'm big on empowering my people and making sure I get the right people and giving them a lot of autonomy in their roles to be able to accomplish what we want to do as a business.
• 15:01
  And, you know, it's a double-edged sword as well for the people because in the management team, because, you know, when you're given that kind of autonomy and that kind of trust,
• 15:09
  and uh and you're delegated to do your job without uh me coming in and micromanaging people you know if you if you if you do fuck things up you know there's no one else to blame but yourself you can't go and blame the top guy or anything else like that so um but it also means that you know if you do things right um it's very very rewarding and uh i find that that's the best way to run the business and i think that's where a lot of our success off the racetrack has come on uh come from uh in the automotive business and and the wider group um and in the race team um
• 15:39
  We've had a few different team principals in the team since I took over.
• 15:46
  But Bruce Stewart working alongside Carl Foe and the wider engineering team.
• 15:52
  And some old people like Macca, who've been around the team for a long time as well.
• 15:58
  We've seen a bunch of different ways the team can be run, but this way seems to be the one that's working the best.
• 16:03
  We've got a really, really tight-knit group of people now.
• 16:06
  in the team.
• 16:07
  And, you know, we moved a few people on over the last few years who didn't have the right ethic and the right commitment to the team, should I say.
• 16:19
  And brought some new people in and, you know, it's been a really, really fantastic change.
• 16:23
  And, you know, a lot of that comes down to Bruce's management style and the management style from the other leaders in the team, like Maka and Carl Foe and so on.
• 16:32
  So, yeah.
• 16:34
  I think that empowering a people management style is what's got us to where we are today, as opposed to me just being a dictator and dumping my fist and telling everyone what to do.
• 16:43
  Does that make sense?
• 16:45
  It does.
• 16:46
  It does.
• 16:46
  And I've never sort of really – I'm sure you have to make tough decisions and, you know –
• 16:53
  There are difficult moments, no doubt, but I've never sensed that style in you, mate, that dictator style is just not what I've witnessed in you.
• 17:03
  And it's very collaborative what you do at times when we're in the pit lane and so on.
• 17:08
  You do manage in the midst of all that to squeeze in...
• 17:12
  a bit of character too.
• 17:13
  So I was doing a report at Bathurst and someone messaged me, you know, an hour or so later, and here am I with the serious face on, which I always have, as you know, doing the chat.
• 17:24
  And then you kind of like moonwalked through the background and looked at the camera.
• 17:31
  and took everyone's eyes off what we were doing.
• 17:34
  That's just naturally you, mate, isn't it?
• 17:36
  Yeah, I like to take the piss out of myself and out of everything else going on around me quite a lot of the time.
• 17:41
  Life's too short to be boring and stale, so if there's an opportunity to have a laugh, I generally try and take it if it's in the right environment.
• 17:48
  So, yeah.
• 17:50
  That video was quite funny, actually.
• 17:51
  I didn't think it actually came out as good as it did, but I've still got that on my phone.
• 17:55
  It was quite a funny little one.
• 17:57
  It's gold.
• 17:57
  Did you ever contemplate race driving yourself?
• 17:59
  And what were you... Did you get your license first go?
• 18:01
  Were you good as a driver straight up?
• 18:04
  I did a little bit of karting and I was quite...
• 18:08
  I was quite decent, but this was back when I was a kid, so you never really know.
• 18:12
  But I wanted to get into racing, but then my dad blocked me.
• 18:16
  I was really good in school when I was a straight A student, and my dad refused to let me take off time from school to go and do that.
• 18:22
  And in Europe, if you're going to go and commit to it, you're pretty much leaving every Thursday night from school and taking the Friday, Saturday, Sunday off.
• 18:33
  And he didn't want my grades to suffer.
• 18:36
  And the school I went to as well, we had Saturday school.
• 18:39
  So we had a six-day school week.
• 18:41
  We only had one day off, which was Sunday.
• 18:42
  So you're committing to doing that.
• 18:44
  And you're committing on Saturday afternoons to missing sports.
• 18:49
  And you wouldn't be able to play any rugby or cricket or football or anything else like that as well.
• 18:53
  So it was kind of very, very destructive to a school life.
• 18:56
  If you're going to go commit to motorsport, as I'm sure lots of people in here will have noticed or will have done themselves.
• 19:01
  They're listening and have tried to have a crack at racing.
• 19:05
  So I wasn't allowed.
• 19:06
  Dad made it very clear that he wasn't going to let me go into racing.
• 19:11
  He wanted me to go and run the businesses eventually.
• 19:14
  But my brother races, so he, my brother hated school and is very, very different to me in that sense.
• 19:22
  And my dad let him race in Sean's, Sean's racing in Europe and in Japan in GD300 over there in the Super GT category for the last few years.
• 19:33
  So he's sort of doing the racing side of what my dad did and I'm doing the business side of what my dad did.
• 19:49
  Hey all!
• 19:49
  Welcome back to Rusty's Garage, and welcome to 2022.
• 19:54
  We've got a big year ahead.
• 19:56
  If anyone's a fan of Drive to Survive, oh boy, do we have a good episode for you.
• 20:02
  Winky face emoji, Netflix emoji.
• 20:06
  Were you always kind of entrepreneurial from a younger age?
• 20:09
  Because you did a few other things.
• 20:11
  I mean, you dabbled in music and DJing as well, so you indulged that side of the passion.
• 20:15
  But were you always entrepreneurial?
• 20:17
  Yeah, definitely.
• 20:17
  So I was – long story.
• 20:20
  I was going to get to Oxford, but I've grown up in Oxford, went to school in Oxford all the way through my –
• 20:26
  My teens went to college and then I was going to apply to Oxford University, but then started to rebel a little bit.
• 20:31
  I wanted to go and have a life outside of just the sort of OX1 postcode and ended up choosing to go to Newcastle and doing marketing and management.
• 20:40
  And to be honest, it was a bad choice because it was a pretty poor subject.
• 20:46
  But off the back of that, just started doing my own businesses, ran our own events, ran our own nights.
• 20:50
  And yeah.
• 20:52
  I've always enjoyed setting businesses up and having a crack and doing work.
• 20:57
  Similar to what I guess my dad had as well in his life, just wanted to get on and start doing things.
• 21:07
  So I think that sort of served me quite well.
• 21:09
  I mean, being a DJ probably didn't exactly add any value to my life and what I'm doing today.
• 21:13
  But the background stuff around doing event management and that sort of thing was pretty, pretty good.
• 21:19
  You learn about all these things you didn't actually learn about at school by trying to be entrepreneurial from a young age.
• 21:24
  You learn about finances and accounting and just the shrewd parts of businesses like negotiations and stuff like that.
• 21:32
  The quicker you learn that, I think the better you learn.
• 21:34
  And it's some things that some people don't learn or don't have as a role in their jobs for quite a long period of time.
• 21:40
  Whereas you're running your own businesses and having a crack yourself, you're kind of thrust into that environment where you have to just get on with it and you learn the hard way, but you learn it fast.
• 21:51
  And I think, you know, the benefits, the positives that came out of everything I did when I was at university and DJing and stuff was that I understood how businesses were to a certain degree.
• 22:02
  And I think that probably was quite positive for when I actually had to take over the family business.
• 22:07
  As we talk to you now, you are dressed, ready to go cycling with some friends in Monaco.
• 22:15
  But I am kind of pleased about that because...
• 22:17
  You went through COVID, right?
• 22:19
  And in Australia now, a lot of people are finally at that phase where they actually know someone who has COVID for, you know, maybe 18 months ago, you would be relying in this part of the world on knowing someone in Formula One or MotoGP or something along those lines.
• 22:35
  We didn't really know too many people locally that had suffered from it.
• 22:38
  And so when it came up in conversation, I would say, hey...
• 22:42
  Listen to this guy.
• 22:43
  Like he's actually been there.
• 22:45
  How much did that knock you around?
• 22:47
  You talked at the time, I think in one post that I saw about it damaging your lung capacity.
• 22:53
  And are you on the bounce from that?
• 22:55
  Are you coming back from that?
• 22:56
  Yeah, I was just one of those unfortunate people that had a bit of a bad time, had normal COVID for a week, felt pretty gross, and then ended up feeling a little bit better for a couple of days.
• 23:05
  Then I got second stage COVID, which is COVID pneumonia, which is actually a bacterial infection that normally your lungs would just get rid of as if it wasn't a problem.
• 23:16
  But because your lungs are so stressed and inflamed and have got the damage left over from COVID, then it sets in quite badly and you get bacterial pneumonia in your lungs.
• 23:26
  which is pretty horrendous.
• 23:29
  And the annoying thing was that the helplines that you have here, you get a phone call from a doctor every single day when you test positive from COVID and you've got to isolate for 14 days at home and every day they give you a call to ask how you're going and all that sort of stuff.
• 23:42
  I was sort of telling them my symptoms and I had a sort of temperature of like 40.5 degrees and 41 degrees and stuff, which is getting pretty serious.
• 23:49
  And I was telling them, they're like, no, no, stay at home.
• 23:51
  And eventually Hayley bought an oximeter for me.
• 23:54
  which is a device you put on your finger, and it detects your O2 levels in your blood.
• 23:59
  And it arrived the next day from Amazon, put it on my finger, it was feeling pretty grubby.
• 24:05
  And this was about sort of five days of this sort of second stage illness.
• 24:10
  And, um...
• 24:12
  And it was down at like 92.
• 24:13
  I was like, oh, 92 sounds pretty good.
• 24:16
  92 sounds not too bad at all.
• 24:19
  And we sort of Googled online, and they were like, 92, you need to go straight to the emergency room because you've got oxygen depletion in your blood.
• 24:24
  I was like, oh, shit, okay, we should probably go to hospital.
• 24:27
  I ended up going to hospital, nearly passed out as I was walking into the hospital, which couldn't breathe very well.
• 24:32
  And the lungs were just very, very, were just really struggling.
• 24:35
  And they kept me in there for 24 hours, put me on a drip and felt amazing afterwards.
• 24:39
  You know, once you've got the big antibiotics in you and rehydrated and got the treatments, you know, it was very, very quick turnaround.
• 24:46
  And then I just had a few more days of feeling pretty shit, but with some good drugs that managed to relieve a lot of the symptoms and got me on the mend.
• 24:53
  But unfortunately the damage was done.
• 24:54
  So when you get pneumonia,
• 24:56
  The inflammation in your lungs can cause scar tissue or fibrosis.
• 25:01
  And unfortunately, I just had too much inflammation for too long.
• 25:05
  And my right lung's got a fair bit of scar tissue, which has screwed up my lung capacity a little bit, which is you can't fix it.
• 25:11
  It's just something you've got to do.
• 25:12
  You've got to train and get your fitness at a level that compensates for the reduction in your lung capacity.
• 25:18
  But yeah, it's just something I've got to deal with.
• 25:21
  And bizarrely, it's not that much of an uncommon story.
• 25:24
  Over here, there's a lot more young people that have had this sort of experience than people realize.
• 25:29
  And the more doctors I've gone and seen specialists and stuff like that over the last year since I had it,
• 25:34
  They all said the same thing.
• 25:34
  They said, if only people actually knew just how many people, even young people, have ended up having this, they'd probably take COVID a little bit more seriously.
• 25:41
  But at the same time, and I'm still a rare case, most people have COVID and have had a pretty easy time or very manageable time, should I say.
• 25:49
  So, you know, I'm not going to pretend that it's the normal thing, but it does happen and it happens to young people as well, which I'm trying to remind people when they're trying to pretend that COVID's not serious or just a flu or whatever the bullshit people say.
• 26:10
  That's the end of part one of my podcast with Supercars team owner, Ryan Walkinshaw.
• 26:15
  Part two is already in the library.
• 26:17
  If you want to hit the gas on it, you can right now.
• 26:21
  Why Chas Mostert was the perfect fit to spearhead the team's revival and some of the fresh faces now in place to help complete that.
• 26:29
  We'll talk a little bit about Walkinshaw performance too.
• 26:32
  You may be surprised to learn just how big the automotive side of the business has become.
• 26:38
  And tool for the job or a special attachment?
• 26:42
  Just how he feels about that Bathurst winning car.
• 26:53
  Listener.