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In little more than three months’ time, Romy Mayer’s long awaited Repco Supercars Championship race engineering debut will finally arrive.
Mayer has been handed the reins for Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Bathurst 1000 wildcard, where Craig Lowndes and Declan Fraser will share the #888 Supercheap Auto ZB Commodore.
The German joined Triple Eight in October 2015 and has since led the charge on cars in Super2 and GT. She’s this year enjoying working on the Banyo organisation’s GT World Challenge Asia programme, with Nick Foster and Prince Jefri Ibrahim winning the season-opening race at Sepang in May.
But the Great Race is a different kettle of fish.
“Jamie [Whincup, team principal] called and asked me and I was like ‘yeah, for sure!’” Mayer told Speedcafe.com.
“It’s great to get that opportunity, very excited about it, and I think even just me personally getting an opportunity to show that I can engineer a race car in the main series.
“I’m super excited to get the opportunity and especially working with Craig as well.”
Lowndes, a seven-time Bathurst 1000 winner, has been a fixture at Triple Eight for more than 17 years now.
Mayer notes her crew will be in the enviable position of having strength across both sides of its driving roster, with Fraser a rising star who is running second in the 2022 Super2 Series.
“We have both drivers very strong so there is not actually one you would say is the main driver and the co-driver,” she said.
“And with the other two Triple Eight cars, it’s obviously one big team so we learn from each other and based off that we work towards a good car and it should give us the best baseline to achieve a great result.”
With the wildcard’s first of three test days in the books, Mayer expects the countdown to October 6-9 to whiz by.
“You feel like it’s towards the end of the season, but especially when you have a wildcard you need to be on the preparation from day one because there’s a lot of equipment that needs to be organised and make sure that everything is on the same level as the cars we always run,” she said.
“And as it’s an endurance round, there’s always extra to do and extra things.
“I’m lucky we have three test days with the wildcard. It helps us a lot in the preparation, make sure everything works, but yeah it’s going to come faster than we all think.”
Triple Eight’s 2021 wildcard engineer, Martin Short, graduated to a full-time engineering gig this year with Broc Feeney.
