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Burgess returns to the paddock, known colloquially as ‘team land’, this weekend after a five-year stint as the head of Supercars’ own Motorsport Department.
The announcement of his move to Team 18 prompted controversy last year given he was able to make the switch without any significant gardening leave.
That didn’t go down well with rivals teams, Triple Eight team manager Mark Dutton and Erebus CEO Barry Ryan among those critical of the move late last year.
Speaking in detail about the controversy for the first time today, Burgess offered a level of understanding as to why those rivals teams may have been upset.
At the same time he stressed that there is absolutely no advantage to be gained from any insider knowledge from last season.
“Everyone’s entitled to opinions,” said Burgess.
“Those people, I don’t think they fully understood the role and what I actually did. I didn’t have set-up sheets, you don’t get set-up sheets, you don’t take their set-up sheets.
“The business has data but my role wasn’t looking at data, that was my data engineer’s role. My job was more the politics.
“I can understand why people may have been upset, I can understand why people say I should have been in the garden for six months. If people wanted to pay for me to be in the garden for six months, I would have done that.
“I respected my contract. I did everything that Supercars asked of me. There’s no issue here, it’s play on and get on with it.
“I didn’t find it offensive. If was where they were, I’d probably be saying the same thing. But there’s probably more information that moves around with mechanics and engineers and drivers than there was in our position.
“If anyone actually questions my integrity, then they can come and see me outside the press conference. And we’ll have a chat about it.
“But you know, I know how I play the game. I’ve been in this industry 38 years for a reason. And I do believe I play it a straight way, I play with a straight bat. And that’s what I’ll continue to do.”
As for his new team principal role, Burgess joked that it’s a welcome change from the politics of his previous job.
“A lot less knives in the in the back, currently,” he said. “It’s good back in team land, back to what I used to be doing before the Supercars role.
“We want to win races. We’re trying to build a team. It’s pretty clear we needed to make some improvements from last year. So we’ve had a driver change and some crew changes.
“I think that the feeling in the camp is positive. It’s a lot calmer than it probably was before and everyone’s enjoying being there and working hard.
“Let’s go practice tomorrow and see where the pecking order flushes out.”
