Kurt Kostecki will both prepare and run his own car as Kostecki Brothers Racing lives on in this year’s Dunlop Super2 Series.
The 21-year-old has returned to racing for the family team after spending 2019 as a Triple Eight Race Engineering driver, although he still worked at KBR.
With brother Jake landing a shared Virgin Australia Supercars Championship seat at Matt Stone Racing and cousin Brodie inking a deal to recontest Super2 with Eggleston Motorsport, that leaves Kurt as the sole KBR entry this year.
It also means that the 2019 Super2 Series runner-up will be working on the car at the workshop himself, with a fly-in crew for race weekends as has been standard practice for the team.
“I’ll be on the grid at Clipsal (Adelaide) in the Development Series, which will be run by KBR and back at my own team, which is cool,” Kostecki told Speedcafe.com.
KBR had already run as a lean operation, with the three Kostecki racers generally joined by one to two other crew members away from the race track, although Kurt is set to be even more independent this time around.
“At the moment it is just going to be me,” he confirmed regarding workshop staff.
“Brodie and Jake have obviously stepped on to bigger and better things, which is awesome.
“Because we’ve sort of downscaled a little bit – two years ago we were three DVS cars, last year we were two, and now just the one – I’ll be prepping the car myself and just trying to scale back a little bit and keeping it a bit more low-key.
“(I’m) looking forward to it.”
Kostecki also advised that he is “still on the hunt” for an engineer for race weekends.
As to the motivation to continue running in Super2, in which he has contested the full season every year since 2016 (but for a round missed due to filling in for the injured Lee Holdsworth at Team 18), he identified the need for race miles as he chases his goal of a maiden tilt at the Pirtek Enduro Cup.
“We’ve wanted to continue on the grid in DVS because obviously I want to get a co-drive this year, and with a lot of drivers retiring two years ago and last year, the co-driver market’s very competitive at the moment,” he explained.
“In order to be able to be in mind for a co-drive, I think one of the main things that most of the teams look at is how many laps the drivers do.”
There are also thoughts of more wildcard starts in the Supercars Championship, as he did with KBR in 2018 at Queensland Raceway and The Bend.
“It’s just another thing that we’re working on in the background,” said Kostecki.
“I’d love to be doing some wildcards this year in the main series. Where that is, I don’t know, but hopefully running DVS will help that cause for sure.”
Round 1 supports the Superloop Adelaide 500, from February 20-23.