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Originally Posted by The Article
Grantlee Kieza, The Courier-Mail
October 22, 2016
Inside the Triple Eight Racing team
INSIDE his fire-resistant suit, Craig Lowndes is lathered in sweat as he plunges his right foot to the floor of his blue and red race car. His face is hidden by a helmet and visor and his hands work feverishly on the steering wheel and gearstick while his feet pump the brake, clutch and accelerator pedals. The 42-year-old motor racing veteran tries to coax every bit of muscle he can from the 635-horsepower engine that’s propelling him like a blur through the concrete canyons of Surfers Paradise.
It’s at least 30 degrees hotter in the car than it is on the beach. The gentle breeze coming off the water can’t *penetrate the wall of highrises or overcome the smell of petrol and *burning rubber as 24 men in fast cars jostle for the lead in the second of the two 300km races that make up the 2015 Gold Coast 600, part of the Virgin Australia *Supercars *Championship. Round and round the cars fly, for 102 laps of the suburban streets, cannoning off the gutters of the 2.96km circuit squeezed between apartment towers and the blue ocean.
Lowndes has won the Australian drivers’ championship three times but not since 1999, and on October 25 last year, with his heart rate surging and his temperature rising at Surfers Paradise, he is in red hot form as, at long last, *another title is agonisingly within his grasp.
His $500,000 race car, assembled, cosseted, tweaked and tuned in a workshop at Banyo, in Brisbane’s north, is capable of almost 300km/h on the open road but most of the Gold Coast 600 is around tight, twisting corners and narrow chicanes, and the speeding machine bucks and kicks beneath him as though crying out for a straight stretch of bitumen to run free.
The cars, bunched together, bump and collide. The *engine noise hurts the ears of spectators watching from the temporary stands or from the highrise balconies. Pieces of car fly off and panels crumple as the drivers are pressed to the outer limits of physical and mental endurance.
“It’s a tough, tight track,” Lowndes says later. “You can’t afford to put a foot wrong. Mentally and physically it’s very challenging. On a hot day at Surfers, it can get as high as 60C in the car when you’re driving. Trying to concentrate for two hours or so in those conditions is tough, and you have to be very careful you don’t dehydrate.”
Or crash. Since 2005, Lowndes has raced for the Brisbane team Triple Eight Race Engineering, a company run by Belfast-born Roland Dane, a hard-driving 60-year-old from a family of high achievers. Dane’s grandfather fought in World War I and as a publishing big-wheel two decades later was tasked with boosting British morale on the eve of World War II by popularising the iconic slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On”.
Dane’s father was a world-leading doctor and virologist who discovered the strain that creates hepatitis B. These days, Dane discovers how to make V8 cars go ever faster and how to keep his team at the forefront of performance and profits in a multimillion-dollar sport that can quickly send teams broke.
Last year, Lowndes finished fourth in the final Gold Coast race and missed out on the Australian Touring Car Championship, finishing second in the overall standings to Mark Winterbottom. But he’s back on the Coast this weekend – along with an estimated 200,000 fans injecting $40 million into the local economy – as the Triple Eight drivers, Lowndes, Shane van Gisbergen and Jamie Whincup, *occupy the top three spots in this year’s Supercars drivers’ championship, which will be decided in *December.
The Supercars blast off for the first of the two 300km races today at 1.55pm. For the millions who will watch the races on television around the world, the racing can look like an elaborate video game.
Up close, though, the roar of the V8 engines make a noise like Riverfire when the fighter jets fly low.
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It’s whisper quiet inside Triple Eight’s concrete and glass corporate headquarters in Banyo. Roland William *Surrey Dane – or RD, as his 50 staff, including 26-year-old daughter Jessica, call him – is explaining the business of motorsport. This mor*ning he has driven his blue Range Rover with the RD number*plates from his home in Brisbane’s inner-north Teneriffe to start revving up his day at 8am. His desk is in the middle of an open-plan workspace surrounded by so many trophies in glass cabinets you could be mistaken for thinking he was the curator of a sporting museum. In a sense, he is. He started his working life as a teenager delivering hand-built British sportscars to the *English homes of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Sammy Davis Jr and Elton John. Now he’s doing his best to deliver another drivers’ championship to his team to add to the six Jamie Whincup has collected since 2008. Triple Eight have also won seven times on the Gold Coast street circuit.
In the 13 years since Dane entered the Supercars race, Triple Eight has become the team to catch. “All told we turn over around $18 million,” Dane says, “but like any sporting team there’s usually a fine line between profit and loss.”
The revenue, he says, comes partly from a proportion of the money through the gate at events such as this weekend’s race, and a share of the six-year $241 million TV deal V8 Supercars brokered last year. “We also earn $1.5 million in royalty income from the rights to sell T-shirts and model cars of our vehicles,” Dane says. “We sell somewhere in the region of 6000 model cars each year. On top of that we have an income source from selling our engineering know-how either as a service or as parts to other teams and racing organisations in Australia and overseas. That represents a gross income of about $3 million.”
But the big deal is sponsorship. Dane takes Qweekend downstairs to his cavernous workshop where the noise level escalates as workmen hover around the race cars. “If you can’t get a sponsor,” Dane says, “then you don’t go *racing, unless you want to lose money. Sponsorship is our biggest revenue.” He points to the Red Bull racing cars *driven by Whincup and van Gisbergen and to the teal-*coloured Caltex Vortex car driven by Lowndes this year. The team runs three cars but also has two spares. “We have an *income across those three cars of about $13 million in sponsorship,” says Dane, whose team has built 45 cars for the V8 series, including seven of the 26 that will be on the grid this afternoon. “But every one of the 26 cars has at least some component that has come from Triple Eight, and we do business at some level with everyone in the competition. The most common component is the pedal box that everyone uses, which is a fairly sophisticated piece of equipment that contains the *accelerator, brake and clutch pedals. Probably half the cars also have driver cooling systems that were built here.”
Outside the Triple Eight headquarters, two huge Iveco prime movers are waiting to transport the cars to the next race. Workmen tinker with the cars using ratchets, drills and spanners. They look like handlers preparing hounds for their next hunt.
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Last year Lowndes was crowned the King of Bathurst after a pulsating race around Mt Panorama that left the 2014 winner, Brisbane’s Chaz Mostert (see Relative Values, page 15), with a shattered car and screws holding his femur together. It was Lowndes’ sixth victory in Australia’s most famous motor race, and his fifth driving for Triple Eight.
This year’s Bathurst race, two weeks ago, was not one to celebrate, though. Problems with his gearing relegated Lowndes to last early in the race and at one stage he had his head under the bonnet with a team of other mechanics. Whincup finished first after the 1000km but was *relegated to 11th after a 15-second penalty for causing a *collision. The *result of an appeal against the penalty may not be confirmed for another week. Triple Eight’s van Gisbergen finished *second *behind Will Davison.
In motor racing, drivers ride the good with the bad. Eleven years ago, after the worst season of his career, Lowndes signed with Triple Eight and he’s been there ever since. They were a relatively new team but Lowndes says he saw “first-hand what Triple Eight were wanting to achieve. They’d had a couple of years of developing here and trying to get their cars fast. For me to walk through their workshop and see where their vision and future was for the team was very inspiring.”
A year later, the team signed Whincup and he and Lowndes won the 2006 Bathurst together. “Jamie was a close second for the championship that year and has been at the front ever since,” Dane says. “In fact Jamie won his very first event with us – one of the most difficult races of the year – the Clipsal 500 in Adelaide (in 2006).”
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Dane’s great-grandfather James Surrey Dane arrived in Adelaide 140 years ago looking to make something of himself, and he became the postmaster at Mount Gambier, South Australia’s second-biggest city. In 1892, Dane’s grandfather William Surrey Dane was born in Adelaide but at a young age, attracted by the commercial possibilities rather than the weather, he made his home in England. He served in World War I.
On the eve of World War II, with Britain casting *nervous glances toward Nazi Germany, William Surrey Dane – then the managing director of publishers *Odhams Press – was tasked with using his media savvy to boost British *morale. According to the National Archives of the British Prime Minister’s Office, W. S. Dane was part of a “Publicity Planning” subcommittee tasked with *making the slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” a “state of mind” in Britain.
Dane’s father, David Surrey Dane, attended prestigious Charterhouse School, in Surrey, but deferred his medical studies at Cambridge to volunteer for the army in 1941, aged 18. He was selected for *officer training with the *Parachute Regiment in 1943 and then the SAS (Special Air Service), operating behind enemy lines. In the early 1950s, after graduating as a doctor, he moved to Adelaide to see the city where his father was born and to undertake *research at Adelaide University.
“He met my mother (Veronica) who was from an Irish family,” Dane says. “She had married an English army *officer and after the war he was seconded to the Woomera nuclear project, but died there; so she was now living in *Adelaide with two young kids. A couple of years later she met my father and they all went back to live in Ireland.”
Dane was born in Belfast in 1956 but “when the troubles in Northern Ireland got really bad, my parents moved to England in 1968”. Dane’s father worked at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London, becoming a world leader in transfusion medicine and isolating the virus *responsible for hepatitis B. The infectious “Dane” particle bears his name.
Young Roland Dane’s passion was cars. When he left school he wrote to Panthers Westwinds, a Surrey firm that made bespoke sports cars with a 1930s look for a largely *celebrity clientele. He’s been in the car business ever since.
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Dick Johnson, 71, won five Australian Touring Car Championships and the racing team he runs will be in the hunt on the Gold Coast today. He knows how tough the racing business can be. He first raced at Brisbane’s Lakeside track in 1964 long before fire-resistant suits were man*datory for drivers. “You could wear shorts and thongs when I started,” he says. “One driver even raced in bare feet.”
Despite his experience and many victories, in 2013 Johnson claimed he was broke after losing a staggering $9.1 million. Only a partnership with American car-racing billionaire Roger Penske could fund his continuation in the sport.
He expects to wipe out a fair bit of cash this weekend. “It’s an old saying that to finish first, first you have to *finish,” Johnson says. “The Gold Coast track is hard on cars with the tight corners. The walls are close and within those walls, the heat doesn’t dissipate much so the brakes get *incredibly hot. They have very aggressive curves through the chicanes, and they absolutely pound the suspension and shock absorbers. We had one race where we ended up with 42 bent wheels from hitting curbs. Half of them you have to throw out. It’s like driving your road car and *running over the gutter at high speed again and again.”
Johnson’s team managed to break Whincup’s run of six drivers’ championships when James Courtney won in 2010 driving Johnson’s car, built by Triple Eight. Courtney won last year’s final Gold Coast race, too, despite suffering *broken ribs and a punctured lung a few weeks earlier when the downdraft of a low-flying Navy helicopter sent a piece of metal hurtling his way in the pit-lane at the Eastern Creek track, west of Sydney. They were the worst injuries Courtney had suffered since he hit a barrier at 325km/h while testing for Jaguar at Monza in Italy in 2002. Michael Schumacher, the Formula One ace, was one of the men who pulled Courtney from his shattered car.
Courtney says that some of the Supercar races he’s been involved in have been so close, there has only been 0.4sec separating 25 cars at the finish. “Racing is a business like any other,” he says. “To be successful, you need the right people around you at the right time, and the right product.”
In 2003, Dane saw Brisbane as the right place at the right time for his product – a team that could dominate V8 Racing in Australia. He’d been competing in motor racing since he was 17, first racing motorbikes and then cars in the UK, Europe and Japan. He spent much of the ’80s and ’90s racing hotted-up Honda Civics and was on the periphery of Formula One, his great mate Derek Warwick competing in close to 150 F1 races and winning at Le Mans in 1992.
Starting in 1986, Dane had also developed a company buying and selling “luxury vehicles, odd vehicles, bespoke vehicles in the UK, Ireland and the Far East”. He still owns 75 per cent of the business. Much of the work was putting armour plating into Mercedes-Benzes for Asian markets, until Mercedes started building its own armoured cars.
In 1996, Dane, Warwick and their partner Ian Harrison founded Triple Eight to race Vauxhall cars for General *Motors in the British Touring Car Championship, and they twice competed at Bathurst, in 1997-98. Then, in 2003, Dane decided to return to the land of his grandfather.
Divorced and ready to spread his wings to the other side of the world, he backed himself with a new venture into Australian racing. “Derek and I sold out of Triple Eight in England in 2003 and I came down here to see what I could do,” Dane says. He bought the racing team of John Briggs at Brisbane’s Bowen Hills and turned it into Triple Eight Race Engineering. New Zealander Paul Radisich was his first driver, followed by Brazilian Max Wilson in 2004.
Then Lowndes and Whincup signed on and Triple Eight has set the pace ever since.
***
A few weeks ago, Dane became an Australian citizen even though he still has a family home in Ireland, his car business in the UK and another daughter, Alexandra, 31, living in England. He says he wanted to be an Australian like his grandfather. He says he doesn’t mind which of his three drivers wins the Australian championship this year, just so long as it’s one of them. This weekend’s racing could have a major bearing on the season finish.
The Supercars first raced on the Coast in 1994 and on June 30 this year, the State Government signed an agreement to keep the Gold Coast 600 and the Townsville 400 for three years after concerns the races might be moved.
The Gold Coast City Council has laid new “super-*bitumen” on parts of the track, saying the new surface can withstand tyre temperatures of more than 100C.
The move was prompted after parts of the Bathurst track disintegrated in 2014, the year that winner Chaz Mostert came from last to first. Mostert missed the Gold Coast 600 last year after his spectacular crash on Mt Panorama two weeks earlier when his Ford ricocheted off the barriers like it was in a giant game of pinball.
Dick Johnson, who has seen his share of crashes, says there’s no worse feeling than to be driving at speed in an ill-handling car. “You don’t need a seatbelt,” he says, “just put a table where the seat goes because your bum will be pinching that hard you’ll never fall off. I guarantee it.”
Johnson reckons a key component for a racing-car *driver is the ability not to panic no matter how bad things look. Even when it’s 60C inside the car, there’s a championship on the line, pieces of speeding car are breaking off and there is carnage all around.
The Triple Eight drivers came off second best at Bathurst two weeks ago but they line up on the Gold Coast today full of fight with a big finish in sight. After all, their boss has built a racing empire by following his grandfather’s mantra to “Keep Calm and Carry On”.
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25 Oct 2016, 00:42 (Ref:3682620)
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