AUSSIE NASCAR Cup Series race-winning crew chief James Small has opened up about his test of a Perkins Engineering V8 Supercar – and how Larry Perkins followed through on a promise made to Small when he was in high school.
Small detailed the story recently in the latest episode of Greg Rust’s ‘Rusty’s Garage’ podcast detailing his amazing motorsport career that now sees him working at Joe Gibbs Racing in the NASCAR Cup Series as Martin Truex Jr’s crew chief.
“I was in high school and obviously we spent a lot of time with Larry and Jack through karting and my dad knew him (Larry) for ever,” Small said.
“Larry said, ‘go and get your mechanical engineering degree and as soon as you’re done, I’ll give you a test in one of my cars’.
“We never spoke about it ever again and five or six years later, I’d literally just finished at Swinburne University, and we did that Formula SAE thing.
LISTEN HERE: James Small on Rusty’s Garage
“We finished that on a Sunday, and it was a week after not sleeping and then I drove to Winton the next afternoon and we tested all day Tuesday – he honoured his deal!
“That same day Moff (James Moffat) was testing, and Timmy Blanchard and it was the three of us flogging around at Winton and it was like 40 degrees outside!
“It went good – I was going to race Development Series that year after with Larry and even do the endurance races in one of the JD (Jack Daniel’s) cars.
“And then it all fell over in mid-January (2007) because of funding for the other guy who was going to be running and it kind of killed my racing career!”
Jack Perkins has dug into Perkins Engineering’s records for V8 Sleuth and has confirmed for us that the test took place at Winton on December 19, 2006.
Small, Moffat and Blanchard each drove the team’s PE 042 chassis, a VZ Commodore that had been driven by Shane Price to finish runner-up in that year’s Fujitsu Series. In fact, it still had the set-up in the car from the final round at Phillip Island held just over a week earlier!
All three drivers had three runs – two sessions of 10 laps and a final run of six laps.
Small went on to join Garry Rogers Motorsport and engineered Lee Holdsworth to his maiden V8 Supercars win in the wet at Oran Park in 2007.
He joined Paul Morris Motorsport in 2008 and engineered Russell Ingall’s Supercheap Auto Commodore before later working for Kelly Racing and Ford Performance Racing.
Small engineered the 2013 Bathurst-winning FG Falcon of Mark Winterbottom and Steve Richards before heading off to join Richard Childress Racing in the United States in 2014 as an engineer on Paul Menard’s Chevrolet in the NASCAR Cup Series.
He has since spent time with Furniture Row Racing and has been with Joe Gibbs Racing since 2019.
