Shop
And that message is that, despite the challenges faced by the code, we have it pretty bloody good.
The Tickford Racing driver’s bout of positivity follows a recent trip to the UK squeezed between the Townsville and Sydney Supercars rounds.
There he undertook a number of racing-related activities, including some driver coaching with Rob Wilson, celebrating the wedding of close friend (and DTM ace) Jack Aitken and attending the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
That meant a high concentration of contact with racing drivers competing in different categories around the world – up to and including Formula 1 – and a lot of interactions that gave him a renewed perspective about Supercars.
“The trip to the UK was really eye-opening,” he told Speedcafe.
“Between Jack’s wedding and being at Goodwood I spent a lot of time with a lot of race drivers from all sorts of categories up to F1. And they all basically said the same thing – you guys are so lucky to be racing Supercars.
“When you speak to people over there, they have a lot of respect for Supercars and us as Supercars drivers. They talk about how we don’t have ABS, we have a spool diff, we have a mechanical shifter – they think we’re crazy.
“There is nothing in Europe like that. You’ve got touring cars, but it’s all front-wheel-drive, paddle shifts… where else in the world does the premier category have a mechanical shifter?
“I know we have some issues with parity, but at least we don’t have Balance of Performance, like they do in GT racing. We don’t have team bosses telling us to slow down to play games with BoP. We are so lucky not to have to deal with that.
“We have big name sponsors. We race on multiple street circuits each year – just think about the organisation that goes into those events alone.
“Having all those discussions with other drivers got me really excited about Supercars. When I was flying home I was thinking, ‘I’m so keen to get back behind the wheel of a Supercar. I’m so lucky to have this job’.
“It was such a pleasant reminder that, yes of course there are things we can improve as a category, but 90 percent of it is pretty damned good. I don’t think we, as a country, give ourselves enough credit for how good our category really is.
“There so much doom and gloom about things like 90-minute practice sessions and sprint formats and the calendar and things like that, but we need a bit of perspective. Supercars is a very good category.”
