Speedcafe can confirm that Moore, currently the race engineer for Jack Le Brocq, has been secured to run Will Davison’s entry at the famous Ford squad next season.
Moore will replace Richard Harris, who is departing DJR after a nine-year stint that included working on car #17 during Scott McLaughlin’s championship three-peat.
The impending change is part of an extraordinary raid by DJR on Erebus, headlined by the signing of reigning champion and Bathurst-winning driver Brodie Kostecki.
Kostecki will move across with his race engineer George Commins and co-driver Todd Hazelwood, while DJR has struck a deal with Erebus to become a chassis customer.
Commins and Moore have been the race engineers for Erebus since 2021.
Moore first joined the team as a data engineer in 2017, moving to a full-time race engineer role with Will Brown in ’21 – a partnership that remained until the driver shifted to Triple Eight this year.
“Tom is leaving with our blessing. It’s a great opportunity for him,” Erebus CEO Barry Ryan told Speedcafe.
“I’ve said to him, it’s a credit that he’s hung around for so long, having come in as a second-year uni student. He’s been here for a long time now.
“I said to him that he needs to try somewhere else to just see what’s different out there. He’s a big loss but we’re proud he’s going somewhere he can have a new challenge.
“Last year he had the opportunity to go with Will to Triple Eight and stayed loyal, which we respected.
“Going to the same team as George and Brodie, at least all our shit is going to one team, not multiple.
“It’s better than all our data and all our setups and everything going to multiple teams. That’s the only positive I can see out of it for us.”
Ryan is philosophical about the flow of Erebus knowhow to historic Ford squad DJR, which is currently undergoing a major rebuild in an attempt to restore its winning ways.
“That’s the business we’re in, unfortunately,” said Ryan. “Sometimes teams get desperate.
“We’ve won everything we can win, we’ve got people we can promote from within and we’ll carry on. The team is not just one or two people.”
Erebus is yet to confirm race engineers for Le Brocq and Kostekci’s replacement Cooper Murray next season.
“We’ve got a plan,” said Ryan.
“We’ve got people we can promote and we’ve had some people approach us that are good race engineers that deserve an opportunity that can step up in our team.
“We’ll be fine. The core people on the floor are the thing I’ve always focused on, getting the cars to the track in the best shape, making sure they’re reliable and fast. That won’t change.
“We already proved that at the end of 2020 when two engineers and two drivers left. It looks bad, but it’s what happens. We’re not a team that can afford to pay people stupid money.”
David Reynolds, Anton De Pasquale and engineers Alistair McVean and Mirko De Rosa left Erebus at the end of 2020, opening the door for the Kostecki/Commins and Brown/Moore partnerships.
Discussion about this post