Reynolds’ heartwarming response to new factory status

It was confirmed yesterday that Team 18 will succeed Triple Eight as GM’s HT, a role that will be formalised during this year.

The decision means that high-profile driver pairing Reynolds and Anton De Pasquale will, technically at least, become the ‘factory’ GM drivers.

For Reynolds, however, the honour doesn’t belong to the drivers. It belongs to the entire team, and in particular owner Charlie Schwerkolt.

“It’s honestly huge,” Reynolds said in response to the news.

“It’s huge for our team, and especially for Charlie being part of the sport for so long, going from, DJR then going out by himself, starting Team 18, being a customer of FPR and then Walkinshaw and then scrapping those customer relationships, and then he started to build his own empire.

“It’s a very noble, hard road to do it that way.

“You don’t have the resources you do as the big factory teams and you can still do a good job, but it’s hard to do a job consistently all the time without the factory backing and all the personnel that comes with and all the pressure.

“Pressure’s a good thing in this sport. So it’s a huge, massive thing for our team, but mainly for Charlie as well.

“He started this journey well before I joined this team and I’ve seen it grown for the last 12 years. It’s really cool to watch his face light up and when he talks about it being the factory team and having that acknowledgement from GM that, ‘we want to run with you, you’re a professional outfit now’.

“We’ve moved workshops and it’s an amazing place, the ethos and everything we have within our team and the guys we have now, it’s going to take us to the next level, and that’s what we need.

“We need that sort of feather in our cap to realise that we’re doing a good job with what we’ve got and now we’re going to go hopefully a lot better.

“I’m just ecstatic for everyone. Like it’s been really cool to watch it all happen, there was a lot of uncertainty at times, but hopefully we can prove them right that they made the right choice.”