IT’S full steam ahead at Box Hill as an expanded Blanchard Racing Team looks to make its mark on the Repco Supercars Championship.
Last year, BRT was the early star of the pre-season, being the first team to put a Gen3 race car on track for testing.
But that counted for little by the end of the year, with the headstart failing to materialise into significant results, and focus shifting to growing to run two main game cars for James Courtney and Aaron Love in 2024.
“It’s coming together pretty well,” team co-principal Tim Blanchard told V8 Sleuth.
“We’ve been doing a full rebuild of all the cars and equipment.
“Obviously doing the wildcard last year was pretty beneficial because we had two complete cars sitting there at the end of last year and most of the equipment to run two cars, but it was all a bit of a rush job if we’re honest.
“So now it’s just about going back through it all and tidying it up and getting it to the standard that we want and that it needs to be for where we want to be.”
Blanchard wants to see both cars consistently inside the top 10, but is realistic given the period of change and the presence of a rookie driver.
“But I think if you look at what Groves have done over the last 12 months, that’s what we’re trying to do ourselves in our team,” he noted.
Love will take over at the wheel of BRT001, the Gen3 Mustang campaigned by Todd Hazelwood in 2023, and continue to be engineered by Chris Fitzgerald – as he was in Super2 and the enduro wildcards last year.
Courtney will be in BRT002, previously only raced at the 2023 Sandown 500 and Bathurst 1000, and will work with ex-Tickford Racing/Thomas Randle engineer Raymond Lau.
Beyond that, BRT has acquired a spare Gen3 car in the form of the ex-Tickford Mustang previously raced by Declan Fraser, and will get to work on building a new chassis (BRT003) for 2025.
Blanchard praised new team manager Kate Harrington’s influence on bringing it all together.
“The last 12 or 18 months it has been Mat Nilsson and myself sharing the responsibilities to run the team on the side of our normal jobs (at CoolDrive),” he explained.
“So having Kate onboard as someone purely focused on running the team and doing all the things you need to do to run a team properly has been hugely beneficial for us, and we have already seen some really good improvements in the way the team is being run.”
For her part, Harrington added: “It’s not easy, there is obviously a lot of work to do with where we need the team to be and the direction that we’re heading, but so far it has been really enjoyable.
“It’s been like a breath of fresh air.”
BRT will head to Winton on February 6 for a rookie test with Love, before both cars take to the track the following day.
