Triple Eight announced this morning that Whincup will make way for Nick Percat in the team’s Enduro Cup line-up next season.
Whincup has elected to focus on his role as managing director of the powerhouse team, although isn’t ruling out a Bathurst 1000 return at some stage.
Feeney said the option of nabbing Percat was first floated when the driver announced his impending retirement from full-time driving ahead of this year’s Great Race.
However, the Supercars Championship leader was expecting the still highly competitive Whincup to stick around for one more year.
“It had sort of come up in conversation, but I thought he would continue on,” Feeney told Speedcafe.
“I thought we’d probably get one more year out of him, I probably didn’t see him going too much past that.
“But it was about a week after Bathurst. He just said, ‘I’m making the call, I don’t want anyone else to make it’.
“There were lots of people that would have been very keen for him to continue going, but he put the boss shorts on and made the call himself.”
Whincup flagged his plan to Feeney and car #88 engineer Martin Short in the direct aftermath of Bathurst, before telling the rest of the team.
Feeney said he understood the decision but questioned whether the seven-time Supercars champion would consider changing his mind.
“We went in a couple of days later and wanted to sit down face-to-face and talk through it,” Feeney continued.
“I said, ‘I totally get your decision, I completely understand where you’re coming from, but is it your final decision?’ And he said ‘yeah, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve done’.
“He’s done it for so long. He’s got so much going on at the moment just with the managing director role, and then we expect so much.
“Once we realised he wasn’t going to be persuaded either way, we said, ‘here’s a shortlist of who we all think is best.“
As for whether Whincup will make a return at some point, Feeney said: “I don’t know. It was interesting, obviously he didn’t come out and say it’s my hard retirement or anything like that. So we’ll wait and see.
“I haven’t really spoken to him about that at all. He’s just said that he won’t be joining me for the next couple of years.”
Feeney stepped into Whincup’s drive following the seven-time Supercars champion’s decision to retire from full-time driving at the end of 2021.
They were paired for the four subsequent enduro seasons.
“It’s been really cool, just for the fact, I never really got to race against Jamie or work with him in the sense where he was a race car driver,” said Feeney.
“So what I learned in the enduro campaigns, especially in the first couple of years, was huge. Once you drive, you drive, but it’s more seeing him in how he operates.
“We see him as a bit of a laidback guy in a lot of areas, but then the business face comes on pretty quick once you get to the racetrack.
“A lot of my prep and, a lot of the stuff that me and Marty do now is all because of what I learned off JW.”
Feeney, though, is left with mixed feelings about his time alongside Whincup, having failed to conquer the Bathurst 1000 together.
“We won here at Sandown, but when I look back on our four years together, it felt like it’s disappointing we didn’t achieve more,” he said.
“I felt like every time we went out together, we had a shot at winning, and we only actually walked away with one win, which is slightly disappointing.
“I’m gutted I couldn’t get up on the top step [at Bathurst] with him. That was that was a big goal of mine, for me to win my first but to get Jamie back on the top step. But we had a crack.”
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