SANDOWN 500 winner Steve Owen has likened teen sensation Kai Allen to the most successful driver in Supercars’ history, Jamie Whincup.
Allen is one of the hottest properties in Australian motorsport, having earlier this month become the youngest ever Super2 round winner and emerged as the centrepiece of a planned 2023 Dick Johnson Racing wildcard for Sandown and Bathurst.
As discussed on this week’s Castrol Motorsport News Podcast, it’s thought to be part of a longer term DJR pathway, with speculation that the flagship Ford squad already has him under contract through 2025.
Industry veteran Owen is as well placed as anyone to assess Allen, having this year taken over from Kurt Kostecki as his race engineer at Eggleston Motorsport, working in conjunction with Dan Kroehn.
As Owen explains, it’s a continuation of his involvement in Allen’s journey, which has seen him rise through Toyota 86s and narrowly miss the Super3 title.
“I first met him at Norwell when he was quite young and we knew early on he was quite good,” he told V8 Sleuth.
“Then I saw him progress through the 86 Series where I have got a role as category mentor, so we saw him running up the front immediately in that category and I got to work with him a bit more there.”
Right from pre-season testing, there was a confidence that Allen would be a contender and he has only gone from strength to strength thereafter.
“He’s the most mature 18-year-old kid you could ever come across,” said Owen.
“He’s more sensible than me and I’m in my late 40s! So that sort of tells you where he’s at.
“Mentally, even when he has a bad day, he reminds me a lot of Whincup from when I drove with Jamie at Triple Eight.
“When he has bad days, he just turns up the next day and he’s ready to go again.
“I notice for a lot of the young kids, it’s very hard to bounce back from bad days but he just puts it behind him and moves on.
“He is just incredibly mature for his age, so when you have got that sort of head on your shoulders when you’re that young, and obviously he has got a lot of skill behind it, that combination ends up leading to success.”
Owen partnered Whincup, who went on to win seven main game championships, in the 2010 enduros, with the pair combining for victory on the Gold Coast.
He later won the 2015 Sandown 500 with Mark Winterbottom, and the Saturday leg of the 2017 Gold Coast 600 with Chaz Mostert.
As for Allen, his reputation hasn’t come out of nowhere, as evidenced by Eggleston taking the rare step of signing him to a 2023 Super2 deal before his 2022 Super3 campaign had even begun.
Owen says it’s merely a matter of time before he’s in the Repco Supercars Championship: “Whether he’s on the grid next year or whether it’s the year after, it’s going to be the team that snaps him up first that’s going to be the luckiest.”
For now, it’s all about maximising qualifying and the rest will fall into place.
“His race pace and his tyre management and the way he uses the brake bias and the bars and stuff is way beyond his experience, so if he qualifies up the front, he generally comes back with a win or pretty close to it,” Owen added.
Allen is just 66 points behind Super2 title leader Zak Best at the season’s halfway mark.
V8 Sleuth’s ongoing coverage of the Dunlop Series for Super2 and Super3 is proudly presented by Biante – Fuel your passion with winning model cars. Visit Biante here to check out their range of model cars in a range of scales from 1:64 to 1:10.
