CHARLIE Schwerkolt says Mark Winterbottom’s triumph at the Darwin Triple Crown represented his most special Supercars victory yet.
Schwerkolt was a co-owner of Dick Johnson Racing from 2008 to 2010, the famous Ford squad winning the championship in the latter year despite a rift which saw the forklift magnate eventually sell his share of the team.
He took one REC (Racing Entitlements Contract, now known as a Teams Racing Charter) with him in the split, initially leasing it back to DJR before launching his own entry, run out out of Ford Performance Racing in 2013-14 and then Walkinshaw Racing in ‘15.
Team 18 became a standalone outfit in 2016 but the wait for a maiden win endured until Race 1 at Hidden Valley earlier this month.
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That followed consistent investment from Schwerkolt, including to revamp the team at various stages.
“I haven’t had a race win myself since 2010 with James Courtney,” he told V8 Sleuth. “This means more.
“I was only a half-owner then. This means more, there’s no one else around.
“We started the team with zero, nothing. I haven’t bought another team, I just started from zero and built it up so the self-satisfaction is incredible.
“This is great, I really hope we can do it again and I think we can.”
Having seen Winterbottom grab pole position at the 2019 Tasmania SuperSprint and teammate Scott Pye score a hat-trick of Darwin podiums in 2020, Schwerkolt celebrated the biggest breakthrough of all up on the podium with ‘Frosty’.
Asked how he kept the faith after so many prior chances had slipped away, Schwerkolt said “you believe in what you do” and noted the result vindicated the off-season decision to end its technical alliance with Triple Eight.
“When Bruin (Beasley, team manager) and Dennis (Huijser, crew chief) said we are going to build our own cars, we’re going to make this work, I thought it’s a big thing but I don’t like copying someone,” he added.
“I didn’t want to copy Triple Eight, I wanted to do our own thing, because if you copy someone, you’re behind them all the time.
“So we did our own thing and it is really a very special time: we built the cars and we have got the result ourselves.
“The people that are around us, far out, the sponsors that have been on the journey – some are 10 years and this means everything to them.
“I have got an incredible fanbase, incredible sponsors, it’s great for the sport I think and it’s great for the team.”
Next up on the Supercars schedule is the NTI Townsville 500 across July 7-9.
