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Pete Ringwood is Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Head of Performance, a position to which he was quietly promoted last September, having arrived in Banyo at the start of 2018.
He works across both of the team’s Supercars, with his responsibility evidenced by the fact that Technical Director Jeromy Moore has been allowed to work at Le Mans this weekend, while Triple Eight races in Darwin.
“Pete Ringwood, who’s our Head of Performance, we’ve stepped up his role and responsibilities this year,” Team Manager Mark Dutton told Speedcafe.
“So, that’s also allowed us to let JJ [Moore] step away and do some of this other racing while Pete’s doing a lot of things that JJ used to do at the circuit.
“Obviously, JJ is still super valuable at the circuit but it was part of getting the most out of your people and keep challenging them, so Pete Ringwood’s really stepped up to that this year.
Moore is this weekend working as a performance engineer and strategist for Proton Competition at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the sportscar classic which he won as a race engineer on one of the Porsche 919 Hybrids in 2016, before being deployed to design the 911 RSR when the LMP1 programme was shut down.
His credentials are therefore obvious, and his profile relatively high.
That Ringwood’s is not makes him something of “an unsung hero,” in the words of Dutton, but is nevertheless “a super-, super-smart guy.”
He may be a virtual unknown in Supercars – unlike Moore, he has not been in the public eye as a race engineer, either – but has in fact worked widely in motorsport and the automotive industry more broadly, with a specialty in vehicle dynamics.
“For us, he’s always been a performance engineer,” explained Dutton.
“He’s worked around the world in various different forms of motorsport, and also a lot in testing and in motorsport education.
“He used to work with Claude Rouelle at OptimumG, where you go around giving lectures around the world about vehicle dynamics, et cetera.
“His knowledge is super deep in tyres and vehicle dynamics, so he’s such a valuable team member.”
OptimumG once worked with Stone Brothers Racing just as it became the pre-eminent team in Supercars in the early-2000s, before Ringwood’s time with the company.
His work touched areas such as IndyCar, the World Rally Championship, and WEC, after which he had a stint at Walkinshaw Racing before joining Triple Eight.
Meanwhile Moore’s return to the WEC paddock comes after a similar cameo last year in IMSA, amid a wind-down in his mammoth workload as the lead designer on the Gen3 project.
Triple Eight holds a one-two in the Supercars drivers’ championship with Brown leading Broc Feeney on the way to the Betr Darwin Triple Crown, where it is also fielding Cooper Murray in the Supercheap Auto wildcard.
