THE grandson of 1987 Bathurst 1000 winner Peter McLeod will contest the 2023 Dunlop Super3 Series.
Cameron McLeod is coming off a fine season in which he placed third in the Australian Formula Ford Championship, and the soon-to-be 18-year-old has committed to taking the next step.
McLeod will race a Nissan Altima, which his mentor Bradley Neill has purchased off MW Motorsport.
Specifically, it’s the race-winning car which Tyler Everingham will drive in this week’s Adelaide Super2 round.
The car, KR005, won a Repco Supercars Championship race at the 2016 Darwin Triple Crown in the hands of Michael Caruso.
“Hopefully with the Nissan being quick we can kind of race up with the Super2s a little bit but we’ll see how we go,” McLeod Jr told V8 Sleuth.
“That would be ideal, to race with the Super2s and make a bit of an impression.”
The Super3 pathway has continued to prove valuable this year, with frontrunning young guns Kai Allen and Brad Vaughan both set to graduate to Super2 in 2023.
McLeod has had several tastes of Supercars machinery, between Neill’s ex-James Courtney/Stone Brothers Racing Falcon, the Erebus Academy’s Mercodore and most recently a Blanchard Racing Team evaluation day in which he also cut laps in KR005.
“I believe that he’s certainly capable of going into Super3,” his father Ryan told V8 Sleuth.
“It started because we took on Bradley Neill as a performance coach for Cameron. I wanted to work on the car myself in the Formula Ford so I got Brad in as performance coach to come to the track and work with Cameron on everything that he is doing.
“He has been quite happy to try to help us get to the next step. He gets on really well with Cameron and he has actually been quite pivotal.
“After Round 1, Cameron did 19 Formula Ford races consecutively without damaging the car.
“We took that championship down to the last round, we didn’t win it in the end, in fact we ended up third, but considering where we came from and considering that we ran that car ourselves, we won a round and all that, I think that was a good stepping stone.
“The option was to stay in Formula Ford again but back in 2021 when we did that compressed trio of races in England in the British Formula 4, that pretty much consumed a season’s worth of budget just to do that.
“He wants to go down the Supercar path.
“We have done the two 6 Hours at Bathurst and he has done Formula 4 overseas and Formula Ford here at state level, which he won in Queensland and was second in New South Wales, and then he went into the nationals.
“So as much as we love Formula Ford, it’s probably not a bad time to look.”
McLeod drove a MARC II car at Challenge Bathurst last weekend; his next race meeting is the 2023 Dubai 24 Hour in January.
Beyond that, he could find himself going door-to-door with another third-generation driver in Jett Johnson, while Super3 has also been flagged as an option for Mason Kelly (son of 2005 Bathurst winner Todd Kelly).
Peter McLeod won the 1987 Great Race with Peter Brock and David Parsons.
