DAVID Reynolds will celebrate his 200th Supercars Championship round start at the ITM Taupō Super400 this weekend.
The 38-year-old made his championship debut as an enduro co-driver back in 2007 with PWR Racing.
He completed another enduro campaign with the HSV Dealer Team the following year before embarking on his first full-time campaign with Walkinshaw Racing in 2009.
After then being demoted to a co-driver role for 2010, Reynolds returned to a full-time drive with Kelly Racing in 2011 and has been a fixture of the grid ever since, through stints at Ford Performance Racing/Prodrive, Erebus, Grove Racing and, for 2024, Team 18.
“It’s my 200th Supercars round, which just means I’ve been around for a long time,” Reynolds joked.
“Motorsport is a very, very hard sport to understand, you know; it’s not like a normal game of football or cricket or tennis where you’ve got a 50 percent chance of winning because you’re playing one other side.
“There’s 24-25 blokes (now). When I first started, there were 32 of us vying for position, so the chances of winning just based on those numbers are quite low.”
Reynolds is one of the few Australian-born drivers on the grid to have prior race experience at Taupō having competed in the local Porsche GT3 Cup category in the late 2000s.
“I remember it being a very hard track to drive, very hard on tyres, quite Mickey-Mouse, and there’s a lot of corners that lead into other corners, so you’ve actually got to think about what you’re doing out there,” he said.
“It’s going to be very hard in a Supercar because the surface is quite old. There are a few parts that have been resurfaced but, as a whole, it’s quite an old surface. I think it was built in the fifties or something and I don’t think they resurfaced it once.
“The tyre deg’s going to be extremely high, so it’s going to be a very hard track to set your car up for; one, for qualifying for doing a fast lap and then; two for the longevity of the tyre over the race.
“We’ve got two 200km races there and it’s gonna be flat out.”
Reynolds is just two rounds into his tenure at Team 18 but holds down fifth in points heading into the weekend, despite qualifying in the bottom half of the field in three of the four races at Albert Park last month.
“We didn’t have a lot of pace but ended up fifth overall in the standings, so it shows our consistency is quite good,” he said.
“We need to work on our car speed depending on what track we go to.
Taupō’s going to be different again because no one really knows what to expect or how to set the car up, or they’ve got no preconceived idea of what’s going to happen.
“It’s going to be really interesting to find out what team goes there and performs.”
The Supercars field will hit the track at Taupō for the first time with a 90-minute practice session on Friday ahead of qualifying and racing across the weekend.
