LEAVING the Triple Eight juggernaut for an opportunity at Supercars’ newest team is not a decision Romy Mayer took lightly.
The trailblazing engineer, who guided Craig Lowndes and Declan Fraser’s Bathurst 1000 wildcard last year, is this weekend entering her second round with PremiAir Racing.
At the Townsville 500, she was in a data engineering role with Geoff Slater and Blake Smith directly operating on the Nulon Camaros of James Golding and Tim Slade, respectively.
She moves into the position of race engineer for Slade this weekend at the Beaurepaires Sydney SuperNight, with Smith unavailable due to other commitments.
Departing Triple Eight, the team with which she linked upon moving from Germany to Australia, was no small thing.
“I had been there eight years and it was a big part of my life, my work at Triple Eight,” Mayer told V8 Sleuth.
“And it’s the most successful motorsport team in Australia so you obviously think twice if you want to make a move.
“But I think it was time for me, especially in the situation where I have a young son and the travel to racetracks with doing GT Asia and GT Australia got a bit too much.
“It was a bit too much time away plus I live on the Gold Coast and travelling to Brisbane every day, it gets to the point where you want to weigh up the benefits or not in spending so much time on the M1 every day.
“And obviously with PremiAir at the Gold Coast and a Supercar team… Supercars is where I started in Australia and from an engineering side it is obviously very high level.
“You have all the different kind of formats, different types of tracks and the endurance events with co-drivers so from an engineering perspective the Supercar race series is very interesting, so I wanted to come back anyway.”
Mayer maintains that being a regular race engineer in Supercars is her dream, and she’s excited to get a taste of it for the first time in a single-driver main game event at Sydney Motorsport Park.
Her first month at PremiAir has her optimistic of what’s to come from Peter Xiberras’ squad.
“They have a lot of good people there, especially most of the mechanics I know from before at Triple Eight so it actually felt like coming back to a family,” she said.
“There is huge potential and everyone pulls in the same direction, it’s a really good environment to work in so I’m super excited.
“Obviously it’s a smaller, newer team and there’s lots of work to do, like how you set up a team with all of the engineering tools but the mechanics are very good and that’s the most important thing, to have a car mechanically in the best shape.
“I’m actually looking forward now to the new opportunities and the challenge to move the team forward.”
Opening practice at SMP starts 12:15pm today.
