Asian Motor Sports

Unassuming V8 Supercar Championship Series leader Garth Tander is quietly going about his business heading into the Sky City Triple Challenge in Darwin this weekend. Come the end of the year, that business could well be a maiden V8 Supercar title.

Team Betta Electrical’s Craig Lowndes remains the series favourite and, while the Holden Racing Team’s Mark Skaife leads on adjusted points, Tander and his equally skilled Toll HSV team-mate Rick Kelly have emerged as the ones to beat.

But you wouldn’t know it. The Toll HSV pair snuck into first and second in the championship at the last round in Winton without much of a whisper. Perhaps they are wary that their position at round five is not something to crow about.

Tander and Kelly’s form has been part of a massive rebirthing of the Toll HSV Team. The team has virtually rebuilt itself from the ground up.

“This is probably the best opportunity I’ve had for a very long time,” Tander said.

“It’s the most realistic chance since 2000 I’ve had to win the Championship.

“But we’re only at the half-way point. You’ve got to work twice as hard in the second half of the year. We’ve effectively set ourselves up, if we fail now we’ve only got one group of people to blame.”

And if he wins this year, what then?

“Simple, win it again,” he quickly replies.

“We’re probably seeing it a bit with Russell (Ingall) who won last year. A lot of people are saying, ‘You’ve won it once, but can you win it again’.”

“I don’t want to finish my career with people saying, “Oh yeah, he won Bathurst once, he won the Championship once, he ran in the top five a couple of times.

“I want to end my career with people saying, ‘He won the Championship two, three, 10 times and was one of the real frontrunners of his sport’.

“I don’t see anything else in the international motorsport scene that offers the same amount of satisfaction winning this Series does.

“I used to be keen to do what Marcos Ambrose has done, go to America and do the NASCAR thing. But I’m 29 now; it’s going to take a good 10 years to get to the top of the game in NASCAR.

“You’re 40 by then, living in a different country. If it works, yes you’re earning good money, but the chance of success for an outsider at the age of 30 starting and getting to the top there would be very slim.”

As an eight-year-old driving go-carts Tander knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. Ten years later the adolescent dream mirrored the child’s, but had been tempered with a dose of reality.

As a race car driver Tander is an anomaly. At 6′3″ he towers above other drivers in the V8 Series.

“At 18 I still wanted to win the Formula One drivers’ championship and become the next Australian Formula One champion,” Tander said.

“But the physical reality was I’d never be a Formula One driver because of my height - they’re jockeys.

“At a very early age I was very much a realist and knew my best opportunity to become a professional race car driver lay in this country in the Supercar championship. In V8 Supercars there’s a bit of room there, it’s not too bad. So I set my goal as achieving that.”

Throughout school and during the 18-month electronics apprenticeship that followed, which Tander describes as the worst time in his life, the determined youngster’s modus operandi was clear.

“Everything I did had some angle for motorsport. What do I need that for to be a race car driver? How can I use this to help me get to where I want to go?

“Coming from Western Australia, and doing it all from that side of the country and no-one having really done it before, it was all virgin territory I guess.

“When I won the Formula Ford championship in 1997 I thought, wow, done that, no-one’s ever done that before, now what do we do? There’s no blueprint for success from this side of the country.

“At that stage I’d run out of money anyway so it was very much a case of, well, I wanted to stay in the industry somehow so I worked the phone to death trying to create an opportunity.”

Tander debuted in the V8 Supercar Series in 1998 driving for Garry Rogers Motorsport. He collected a fistful of wins in 1999, finished second in the championship and won Bathurst in 2000, then wandered into an accolade-free wilderness for a few years.

Loyalty kept Tander in the podium-deprived team, despite opportunities to jump ship. It’s a reflection of his strength of character that he is prepared to acknowledge, and repay, debts owed to team-mates, fans and sponsors. His integrity is now being rewarded.
(Via XTRA MSN)