David Reynolds has opened up on a pair of high-profile missed opportunities at the Bathurst 1000 in the latest Speedcafe Podcast.
The likeable Supercars star is a Bathurst 1000 winner, however he has also endured two very close calls at further Great Race success.
The first was 2012 when, while driving for Ford Performance Racing, he and Dean Canto finished a very close second.
The race boiled down to a fierce battle between Jamie Whincup and Reynolds, the former with track position but also in fuel-saving mode.
Reynolds shadowed Whincup for the last 10 laps and spent the last lap parked right under the T8 Commodore’s rear wing.
But despite looking much quicker he failed to execute a race-winning pass, one opportunity something he admits to regretting.
“I had one decent opportunity [to win the race],” he told Mark Fogarty on the Speedcafe Podcast.
“It was pretty much on the last lap up Mountain Straight. I got a really good run out of turn 1 and I wish, if I had my time again, I had just bombed him down the inside and seen what happened.
“But it was a long-arsed day and it was my first Supercars podium. Your life is full of regrets. If you don’t have regrets, you’ve done a lot of things wrong in your life. That was one that got away…”
A more painful failure, both emotionally and physically, came in 2018 when Reynolds and Luke Youlden returned to the Mountain as the reigning Bathurst winners.
They had then race shot to pieces for a second year running, only for Reynolds to come down with severe cramping in the final stint.
He had to pit to hand the car over to Youlden, which handed victory to Craig Lowndes and Steven Richards.
“My brain started shutting parts of my body down because it was exhausted, basically,” said Reynolds.
“If we didn’t win the year before, we would have cleaned that year up. But the problem is, when you win Bathurst you go into this huge media tour, and I expended all my energy to do 35 different appearances over three days and I was exhausted. And I couldn’t recover.
“I slept really badly, stressed myself out too much, put too much pressure on myself. I knew something bad was going to happen that weekend. I didn’t quite know what it was going to be.
“That’s just part of being an athlete. You’ve got to learn to manage your energy and you’ve got to learn to say no to things. It might piss people off, but every time you say yes to interviews or TV stuff… I might seem like an extroverted person, but it takes me a lot to get there.
“We didn’t manage my energy well for that week. I had an expiration time in the car, and it was unfortunately when we had the best car.
“If I was to go through something like that again I would speak up and say, ‘hey I probably shouldn’t do so much of this media stuff and focus more on my job’.”
For more with David Reynolds listen to the Speedcafe Podcast.
