Red Bull gamble throws wild card into V8 Supercars season

ROLAND Dane is going to have to be careful or his reputation as a hard-nosed prick is going to end up in tatters.

The owner of Triple Eight Race Engineering did as you would expect of a merciless motorsport mogul when he secretly signed Shane van Gisbergen in 2014 to a three-year deal that starts at this year’s V8 Supercars championship opener, the Clipsal 500 on March 5-6.

Dane identified the ludicrously talented Kiwi as the next big thing in V8 racing and decided he had to have him in a Red Bull Racing Holden Commodore VF, even though it meant poaching him from his own customer, Tekno Autosports.

So far, so cut-throat.

At least in part, Dane is doing this because he feels an obligation to Lowndes. They joined up in 2005 before T8 was a powerhouse when the safe bet would have been for Lowndes to stay with Ford Performance Racing.

Even Dane acknowledges the risks he is taking.

“I like the concept of two cars and … the only reason we are running three cars is because we are in a position where we want to carry on running Craig as long as possible and as long he wants to,” he told Wheels. “It is a fairly unique set of circumstances.”

Other teams run three or even four cars, but T8 is the operation that has dominated Australia’s most popular, most professional, hardest fought and highest profile motorsport category for a decade.

Now Dane has junked that and thrown a hairy, oppy-locking, tyre-smoking grenade into the mix.

Whincup and Lowndes have got on as well and as co-operatively as motorsport team-mates could, but van Gisbergen will change that dynamic seismically. He’s the young gun, the next big thing and the two established T8 drivers will simply be targets for him to beat.

Along with that very visible management issue comes a rearrangement of the backroom line-up. Engineers have swapped, mechanics have been reallocated, more staff hired, more cars and parts built – including for T8’s growing band of customers. Logistics have inevitably become less wieldy.

There’s no doubt fiddling with a successful formula can cause success to go from expected to elusive, like it did for Whincup in 2015. It took a temporary shuffle of engineers to get that speed back again. But in the process he dropped out of contention for the championship.

But T8 has a habit of rising to challenges; like when it swapped from Ford to Holden in the 2009-10 off-season and still won Bathurst and was just pipped for the drivers’ title.

Besides, anyone who really thinks Dane is expanding because he’s gone soft isn’t looking at the whole picture. Lowndes is still blisteringly fast. He won Bathurst for the sixth time in 2015 and doggedly pursued Winterbottom in the drivers’ title, finishing runner-up for the sixth time.

Then there’s the commercial reality. As the fan favourite, Lowndes drives massive commercial returns for T8. He’s a merchandising monster and a sponsor magnet.

The Caltex deal is said to be by far the most lucrative in the category on a per-car basis and the involvement with Lowndes will be mass-marketed. He’s the only driver on the grid who has the widespread public recognition and appeal to do that.

“You would have to be bonkers to say goodbye to Craig,” Dane says.

Meanwhile, the team expected to be 2016’s big improver, DJR Team Penske, grows from one car to two, having signed Fabian Coulthard to join Scott Pye. Again, maximising performance is the reason cited.

All up, the entry for 2016 (shown in pitlane order below) grows by one to 26 cars. They will follow a more logical calendar that arranges the championship in two more concentrated blocks.

There’s also a revised Supersprint format, a trip to Kuala Lumpur … and the prospect of watching the best team in Australian motor racing rise to its latest self-imposed challenge.

If it doesn’t, don’t worry; the mongrel in Roland Dane will soon reappear.