Following the departure of long-time CEO Tim Edwards at the end of last year, Tickford Racing pounced on what is something of a new trend in Supercars.
Rather than recruiting from within motorsport, it split the team principal and CEO roles and cast its net in the search for a new chief executive far and wide.
The results was the appointment of Brookhouse, who arrived with nothing in the way of motorsport experience, fresh from a stint heading up NBL’s newest franchise, the Tasmania JackJumpers.
His Supercars career is now four rounds old, Brookhouse experience almost everything from the lows of a slow start for title hopeful Cam Waters, to the high of two podiums (one of which was a win) for Waters last time out in Perth.
Following that Perth triumph, Brookhouse sat down with Speedcafe to chat about his initiation to Supercars.
In his estimation, there are similarities in operating costs between an NBL team and a Supercars team.
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The key difference, however, is that the cost of operating an NBL team can be mostly predicted. Motorsport, however, comes with a number of unknown elements. Such as crashes.
“To be honest with you, if you just looked at our race team, the turnover of that compared to an NBL basketball team is probably very similar,” he said.
“But I think there is more that can go wrong with us. Generally speaking, you know your cost of the basketball team.
“We all saw that awful incident [for Cam McLeod] in [the Dunlop Series in Perth]. There’s a lot of money there to get that fixed.
“And we’ve seen it ourselves this year. At the AGP we had just rebuilt the Monster car and then it hit a wall and we had to rebuild it again.
“There’s certainly more things that can go wrong and they can prove to be catastrophic in this sport compared to an injury to a player, who you can replace at any time, in a basketball team.
“That means that you do rely more heavily in this sport on your corporate partners. There’s no doubt about that. You don’t have the luxury of home games with fans paying for their tickets to come in. You don’t have the luxury of government money supporting teams.
“We have to work a little bit harder and work out where we can get other revenue from things like ride days. Can you corporatise those and do one in Perth for Rio Tinto and all of the executives and have them pay? That sort of thing.
“For us, it’s about how we do things a bit differently to keep us ahead of the pack commercially, as well as on the track.”
The mixed start to the season was eye-opening for Brookhouse, who was immediately subjected to the expectations of heading up one of the biggest teams in the series… and one with a passionate fan base.
That meant managing expectations both within the team, and outside of it.
“It’s about communication, and that’s internally and externally,” he said.
“I think sometimes we don’t communicate well enough internally in the organisation. So we’ve certainly made a real effort to do that, and not let things get us down. Let’s be upfront and honest about what’s gone wrong.
“And I think it’s also about keeping our fans as positively engaged as we can through newsletters and various things that we send out.
“We always knew we were going to turn the corner and things were going to go our way to some extent. But you know, it’s a fickle game. And everyone else along the pit lane is going to be wanting to beat us next time.”
Expectations on Tickford heading into this season were particularly high, with many predicting the effort to scale back from four cars to two to be a silver bullet of sorts.
Instead, Brookhouse reckons it has taken time for the team to adapt, and the benefits of the streamlined Tickford are really only now being felt.
“It took us a little while to get into a working rhythm of what we’re trying to achieve,” he said. “And the team, to their credit, have done a fantastic job of turning that around.
“We were probably a little bit behind the eight ball because of the changes come round 1. I think we saw that a little bit at Bathurst, even though we had a bit of luck go against us as well.
“But we’ve just gradually been getting better and better. And, to be fair, finding out more about ourselves and our cars.”
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