The Chevrolet squad enters a new phase of its latest rebuild in 2026 with second-year driver Cooper Murray paired with rookie Jobe Stewart.
The latter arrives as part of a long-standing association with Erebus through its academy program that started back when he was racing karts.
While Stewart didn’t always have the equipment to shine in Super2, there were moments of blistering speed – such as his efforts at the season-opening Bathurst round in 2024.
His potential was then underlined by starring roles alongside Murray at The Bend and the Bathurst 1000 in Gen3 hardware this year.
That sealed his promotion to the main game, with Ryan likening his latest prodigy to the driver who took Erebus to its maiden Supercars crown, Kostecki.
“[Stewart is] a strange character [and] that’s not a bad thing,” Ryan told the KTM Summer Grill.
“He’s very intense in the way he works out how to drive a race car or a go-kart or whatever he does.
“He’s very strong on the sim. He doesn’t just use it as a game; every time he’s in his sim, he’s he’s trying to learn how to be a better racecar driver, whether it’s to focus for 50 laps in a row, or whether it’s how you race people.
“He and Cooper set up racing simulations and actually try and work at the best places to pass people. In Adelaide he really showed that he’d done a lot of work on how to pass people, and he did a great job of passing people in the Super2 races when he qualified out of place.
“It’s just his character. He’s just got this real racing brain, like Brodie. The way I can compare them, they both use the sim as a powerful tool to make their driving better. Jobe’s very much in line with what Brodie used to do.
“It’s going to be good to see how he puts it on the track next year. If it’s anything like he did at Tailem Bend and Bathurst, he’ll be straight up where Cooper is, at least.”
Erebus famously took a punt on rookies Kostecki and Brown for the 2020 season after David Reynolds and Anton De Pasquale both departed the team.
Kostecki and Brown then took the team to new heights with a successful 2023 season, before Kostecki helped the squad to its second Bathurst 1000 triumph a year later.
Ryan is now expecting a similar dynamic from Murray and Stewart as they push each other, something he feels will get Erebus back to the front of the field on a regular basis.
“They’ll be pushing each other because they’ve become really good mates, and they’re really working together well and training [together], whether it’s physical training, sim training, talking about race cars, trying to learn how to engineer a race car better from the driver’s seat,” he said.
“All that stuff is what drives the team forward. And we saw that back in the day with Brodie and Will, that those two helped drive the team forward because they were so committed to working together and making sure one of them won.
“Until one of them was winning, no one was winning. And that’s the attitude we tried to instil in those two.
“They ticked the box really well, and these two are going to do the same thing.”
Ryan also affirmed on the Summer Grill that Erebus will not be part of GM’s planned technical tie-up between Camaro teams, instead electing to remain fully independent.
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