Last year’s Mike Kable Young Gun Award winner, Matt McLean, remains committed to Super2 despite missing this weekend’s Valo Adelaide 500 round due to a budget shortfall.

The national-level karting champion had been hopeful of contesting the sixth and final round of the season, as evidenced by the ‘TBA’ next to Car #54 on the entry list, but Eggleston Motorsport is in fact fielding just the one VF Commodore, for Cameron Crick.

McLean was the top rookie in the 2021 Super2 Series, when he ended the year fifth in the standings, but that is his only full season in the competition thus far after he also sat out this year’s Townsville round.

In his first event back, at Sandown, he was among those caught up in what was a literal pile-up for some on the final lap of Race 2 at Turn 3, causing $60,000 worth of damage.

“We’re not running this weekend at Adelaide, unfortunately,” McLean told Speedcafe.com.

“We pulled out, last-minute, due to a budget shortfall.

“We had a few setbacks in the year, most notably the Sandown crash, which is a hell of a lot of money that we didn’t account for in the year, and it’s things like that which have sort of put us behind on budget.

“It’s super-disappointing to not be out there given the pace which we’ve demonstrated at each of the rounds we’ve run this year, but at the end of the day, we’ll just work towards next year and put together a really good year.

“We’ve got some really exciting stuff that we’re working on as well, so really looking forward to announcing some of that stuff soon.”

When the Victorian has started a Super2 event this year, he has been quick, topping more practice sessions than anyone else (at Sydney, Wanneroo, and Bathurst) despite having only two-thirds of the opportunities of most to do so.

He affirmed that he will stay in the competition in 2023.

“Yes, we will be running Super2 next year,” added McLean.

“That’s about all I can say so far, really, but we’ll have some pretty exciting stuff to announce on next year’s plans in the coming months.”

Series leader Declan Fraser has put his Triple Eight Race Engineering VF Commodore on pole position for both of this weekend’s 19-lap races in Adelaide, the first of which starts today at 13:55 local time/14:25 AEDT.