THERE is a new name to keep an eye on in the Supercars ranks this year: former sprintcar racer Callum Walker.
The 24-year-old is bucking the usual path into Super2, making for a journey that will catapult him straight from dirt racing into a Supercar tearing around the streets of Newcastle this time next month.
It’s quite the leap and one made all the more extraordinary by the catalyst for his switch.
“I raced karts all the way up until I was 16 and then when I turned 16 I had the option to go in either direction,” Walker told V8 Sleuth.
“We decided to go the speedway route because I’m from a speedway family, so I went in that direction and raced that successfully up until Easter last year.
“The thing that really changed the whole deal with me in the speedway side was I broke my back for the second time last year.”
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Walker broke the T8 and T9 (thoracic) vertebrae in his spine in a crash at Archerfield Speedway.
That followed a 2018 incident at Toowoomba which left him three broken lumbar vertebrae (L1, L4 and L5).
“It was kind of the moment where I didn’t want to line up for strike three, as you could imagine,” Walker continued.
“With that being said, I started looking at different options to pursue my racing further and increase the level of competition so I looked at various categories.
“At the end of last year I did a few test days in a Porsche and that was all really good but in January this year, we were talking to a guy that knew Peter Xiberras from PremiAir Racing, so we got in contact with Matt Cook there and we ended up leasing a car off of them.”
Walker will race a Holden ZB Commodore driven by the likes of Lee Holdsworth and most recently James Golding.
The 888A-044 chassis has undergone a rebuild at Garry Rogers Motorsport, which picked up the off-season project with Triple Eight and PremiAir Racing full steam ahead on Gen3 builds.
Based out of Slacks Creek in southern Brisbane, Walker Racing is hoping to make it out to Queensland Raceway during pre-season for what will be the privateer’s first steer of a Supercar.
Despite his relative inexperience heading into Round 1 at Newcastle, he is confident he has what it takes.
“You have got to be realistic… our main goal is really just to be in the eight or the six in the championship, and the beauty of that is that gives you the eligibility to get a Superlicence in the future,” said Walker.
Having already competed against the likes of Cam Waters in sprintcars, Walker is keen to surprise those who’ve never heard of him.
“I know I am doing it differently to everybody else,” he said.
“I’m actually really excited, not to say that I’m an experiment, but I am different to everybody else and that is something that can correlate into a cool story, in that I am the sprintcar kid racing in Super2.”
Walker is the latest addition to a growing Super2 field, which may yet see the popular Matt McLean join.
McLean has publicly spoken of his desire to secure a Super2 deal following a partial 2022 campaign, and is being linked to a seat at MW Motorsport in an ex-Tickford Racing Mustang.
