Interview: Todd Kelly on his team leaving Supercars

"You can’t do the same thing forever… well, actually, you probably can,” says Todd Kelly. But he and Rick won’t be doing the same thing anymore. At the end of the 2021 Supercars season, the Kelly Brothers, Todd and Rick, will hand over the keys of Kelly Racing to their current father-and-son team partners, Stephen and Brenton Grove.

Currently, the Kellys and the Groves each have a 50 percent stake in the racing team, presently known as Kelly Grove Racing. Already a year of transition – the first without Rick Kelly behind the wheel of one of their cars – 2021 will also be the last without the brothers running the team.

But why? With the ink not yet dry on exactly how Gen3 will run, and after more than a decade of being busy managing a race team and manufacturing business, it’s understandable that now is the time the Kellys are handing over the team.

After 13 seasons under a very ‘old school’ team model, Kelly Racing has hit peaks and troughs through an at times wildly transformative era in Supercars. Rick’s focus is no longer on racing, having hung up the boots at the end of 2020, and Todd’s main two roles as team principal and managing the factory side of the business have left him understandably busy in the years since he last drove... not that he complains.

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But the brothers never departed from a core value that Todd intends to take into the post-Kelly Racing part of his life – self-sufficiency.

“When we kicked off we always wanted to do everything ourselves, internally,” Kelly says.

“There are a few different business models within race teams and it’s quickly changing as the sport evolves. In the old days the teams like the Stone Brothers, DJ, HRT, and Perkins used to do most of the work themselves.

“They all had their own engine shops, their own CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine shops and fabrication departments. Most teams did their own bodywork and paint, but as things have evolved, some teams have gotten bigger while others have gotten smaller… and the small ones are just customer teams.

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“In the future, not being able to build your own engines... well, those are the things I really enjoy doing. At the moment we’ll continue to do that, but in terms of what our involvement will be, we’ll see where it goes in the future as to what you can and can’t do.”

What’s certain is Todd will continue to manage the manufacturing side of the business, which will service and supply not only Grove Racing in some capacity, but also Supercars into the Gen3 era. That aspect of Kelly Racing, Todd says, had been the team’s major advantage through the years.

I won’t be a team owner next year, and potentially won’t be at the track...

“As it turned out, that really enabled us to bring in Nissan, as we had the capability to do every aspect of the Nissan car [on site here in the workshop] at a time when not many teams had that ability.

“The operation was [initially] set up just for ourselves, but as time went on we’ve built it up and taken on some extra customers on top of the race-team work, both inside of and outside Supercars and motorsport. It’s a good operation which was built to facilitate the race team, but also to complement it and stand alone.”

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Are there any other teams with a focus like this? “Nobody to our level. A lot of teams still outsource signwriting, and it’s only Tickford and Walkinshaw that do their own engines in-house. And us. Everybody else outsources. There are varying levels but there’s not another team that does as much as us internally.”

With the changing of Supercars and Gen3 regulations on the way, Kelly says some of the traditional aspects of the sport (engineering, for example) might not be as big a focus for the category, but he’s not letting that go quite yet. While the Groves will take the race team in the sale, the manufacturing assets and engineering capability stays with the Kellys.

“I won’t be a team owner next year, and potentially won’t be at the track – I hope to find an engine tuner that can travel and look after the engines on the race weekends. I’ll be workshop-based, looking after everything in the background.

“We’re making quite a few things for the Gen3 cars, but as things get drawn up and released we’ll have a go at creating as much of it as we can through the Supercars tender process. There are just thousands of tiny little things, from little bobbins that need to be welded into the roll cage, to complete suspension components... all of those things are still in the tender process.”

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Life in the Kelly gang

2009-2012: The Commodore Years

With assets bought from Perkins, the Kelly family (including parents John and Margaret) started the team and ran four VE Commodores. Rick, Todd, Dale Wood and Jack Perkins comprise the team’s first driver line-up. Their first win came in 2011, with Rick taking out the team’s maiden victory at the Hamilton 400.

2013-2019: Nissan Altima

As regulations changed and the ‘Car of the Future’ entered, the Kellys switched to the Altima and rebranded as Nissan Motorsport. Michael Caruso, Dean Fiore, and Simona de Silvestro are among the team’s mainstay drivers with the Kelly brothers through this period. Todd retired from driving at the end of 2017, replaced by Andre Heimgartner for 2018.

2020-2021: Ford Mustang

Following Nissan’s exit from Supercars, Kelly Racing swapped to the relatively new-to-Supercars Ford Mustang after using 2019 as a transitional year with the Altima. 2020 was also Rick Kelly’s last year behind the wheel, with the team in 2021 running only two cars, driven by David Reynolds (a former Kelly team driver) and Andre Heimgartner.