The Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 has been run and won, and I’m extremely pleased to be able to say that Kelly Racing has returned home to Melbourne. After 106 days away and covering over 15,000km up, down and across the country we arrived back at Kelly Racing headquarters in Braeside at 2:15pm on Monday afternoon.
All of the travelling crew were able to return home and see their loved ones for the first time in months and myself and the entire Supercars community cannot thank them enough for their commitment to the sport and our team.
What they have achieved is quite extraordinary, we worked out that over the eight rounds we stopped in 57 different towns and slept in 24 different beds. It was such a big sacrifice for each team member to make for our team that I had a 2020 Championship Completion trophy made for each of them that I handed out when we arrived back at the workshop.
The travelling crew will take the next couple of weeks off to spend time with their loved ones and recover after what has been an extremely intense period. While we definitely had some fun and did some cool activities along the way, everyone has worked incredibly hard and obviously sacrificed a lot over the last few months.
As for the Bathurst 1000 race, we had a few things that didn’t go our way but I think we can hold our heads high and be proud of the fact that both cars completed the race. The clutch in Rick Kelly’s car failed pretty much before the race had even started – he started feeling it let go on the warm-up lap and by about five laps in it was completely gone.
Rick continued racing and shifting gears without the clutch which is quite tricky when you’re downshifting and not something that can be sustained for a 1000km race. We brought him in around lap 20 and the guys diagnosed the issue, replaced the clutch and got the car back on track within about 30-minutes which was awesome. It was never an option to retire the car that early in the race and despite being seventeen laps off the lead and completely out of the competition we still got to the end and Rick and Dale finished seventeenth because eight other cars didn’t finish the race.
André Heimgartner’s race went relatively well, his car showed a lot of pace and was strong all day. Unfortunately we made the call to put wet tyres on when the shower rolled in which hurt us in the end as we were the only team to make that call and that eventually meant we finished the race having completed two additional pit stops. André and Dylan still finished P11 which shows how quick the car was. The co-drivers Dylan O’Keeffe and Dale Wood also did a fantastic job, especially considering they hadn’t driven a Supercar at all this year.
We’re now officially in the ‘off-season’ but there’s still plenty happening, we’re about to start the Supercars Pro Eseries next week which will run for six weeks. And as soon as the guys are all back on deck in a couple of weeks we’ll be straight into preparation for next season. The cars will all be stripped right back to a bare chassis and cleaned right up before we start next year’s Championship.
