JAMIE Whincup brought an old friend back to Mount Panorama for last weekend’s Repco Bathurst 1000.
‘Kate’, his multiple championship-winning and 2012 Bathurst-winning Holden Commodore VE II, was one of the rolling exhibitions that was part of the event’s 60th anniversary celebrations.
Whincup, who owns the car, joined the Legends Display demonstration runs on Saturday afternoon – the car’s first laps on the Mountain since it took the chequered flag at the end of the 2012 event – before co-driver Paul Dumbrell took over for Sunday morning’s festivities.
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Its Bathurst triumph was one of 28 championship race victories earnt by the car across its competition life, a mark that stood as a Supercars record for almost a decade until being surpassed by Shane van Gisbergen’s double title-winning chassis Chastitii.
That it was able to accrue so many wins was in part due to its unusually long period of active duty by Triple Eight standards.
Chassis 888A-023 came onstream at the start of the 2010 season and was the car Whincup drove to victory at Yas Marina in Triple Eight’s first race as a Holden team, before heading to the sidelines midseason when he moved into a new car, Chassis 27.
Yet he was back aboard Chassis 23 for the start of 2011, starting a run of success that included back-to-back title wins, a Bathurst win, and an emotional Adelaide 500 victory in 2012 in the wake of his father’s passing.
The chassis’ race history is covered in depth in V8 Sleuth’s book, Triple Eight Race Engineering, The Cars: 2003-2023.
As part of the research into the car’s history, we were able to solve a mystery: why did Kate come back for 2011?
Whincup was the only Triple Eight driver to change cars for that season.
Craig Lowndes, on the other side of the garage, persisted with the car he moved into midway through 2010, and its high mileage by the end of 2011 prompted Lowndes’ move into a different car for the last year of the Project Blueprint era.
It certainly wasn’t high mileage on Whincup’s six-month-old Chassis 27 that prompted Kate’s return.
Nor was it the result of a large hit; Whincup’s Bathurst practice shunt and infamous Homebush Saturday race crash notwithstanding, Chassis 27 was more than fit for race duty in 2011, when it was driven to the Dunlop Series title by Andrew Thompson.
So why did Whincup move back into an older car?
In an era when Supercars teams were becoming increasingly data-driven, it was old-school, seat-of-the-pants feel that prompted Chassis 23’s recommissioning.
“As a racing driver you end up generating a weird relationship with the racecar,” Whincup told V8 Sleuth for the book.
“Remember, you spend hours working together to achieve a common goal and I always used to say to my cars, ‘if you look after me, I’ll look after you’.
“I ended up generating a better understanding with Chassis 23 than 27, so for the start of 2011 I decided to go back to Chassis 23, and I’m glad I did.”
Whincup has owned the car since the end of its racing career, purchasing it direct from Triple Eight and commissioning former team mechanic Garry Bailey to give it a ground-up restoration to its Great Race-winning trim.
Keen-eyed Sleuthers will have noticed one detail on the car at Mount Panorama that was different from how it looked in 2012; the Caltex logos of the period gave way to Ampol logos for the weekend.
