Keeping up with the Jones'...and Bowe
13/12/2001 14:00 (V8 Wire - Jason Whittaker) -
At 41, veteran racer Brad Jones is not slowing down.
OzEmail Racing Team's Brad Jones
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After an inspired charge onto the Bathurst podium in October, Jones is taking one of the most significant steps of his motorsport career – expanding his modest Albury garage to a two-car Ford V8 Superteam. Here, Jones talks about teaming with equally experienced recruit John Bowe, and the goals set to become a regular visitor to the podium in 2002.
This week has been one of the biggest in my V8 Supercar career. The announcement on Wednesday that John Bowe will be joining the OzEmail Racing Team is a major step for us and it allows the team to basically start new for the 2002 championship.
Before we came into V8 Supercars at the start of last year, we had been fortunate enough to taste success in most of the motorsport categories we had raced in. In contrast, I can remember sitting on the 13th row of the grid at Barbagallo Raceway in Perth last year after qualifying 25th and thinking, “what the hell am I doing!” I couldn’t remember starting a race that far back in my entire career.
V8 Supercars has proved to be the most competitive championship I have ever been involved in and the last two years have been steep learning curves for me and the entire team. It doesn’t matter how much ego or motivation you have, when you are sitting on the fourth-last row of the grid, you become very self-analytical.
I would be lying if I didn’t say that we have been frustrated at times with our lack of success but the reality is we faced three major hurdles.
As I’ve already mentioned, we entered what is now widely recognised as the most competitive Touring Car championship in the world. Secondly, we entered V8 Supercars in the same season they restricted test days for teams to only twelve and, lastly, we lacked the raw V8 Supercar experience to make us super competitive.
We have made a lot of progress this year and the last four months for the OzEmail Racing Team have been very productive.
We started to get some real gains from our in-house built OzEmail Falcon from about the Queensland 500 onwards. Obviously our second place at Bathurst was a real highlight, but even our top ten finish at Sandown in the last round of the year was encouraging.
What the last four months have done for us is stop the need for soul searching and allowed us to make positive plans for the future.
These plans include the new start for OzEmail Racing with the expansion of the team to two cars. This is something that I set a goal to achieve during this year’s championship and it feels great to be able to accomplish it.
I have to give a big thanks to OzEmail and Ford Racing who have financially made it all happen.
John Bowe has been a long-time friend but, more importantly for the team, he brings with him a wealth of knowledge on Ford V8 Supercar set-up – one of our missing ingredients.
Running two cars for John and I will be a lot of hard work but the advantages are far greater.
The ability to experiment with two cars during a test day provides at least double the amount of data than we have been able to source before. Obviously there are economies of scale with replacement parts and panels, but probably the biggest advantage is having two heads, with two opinions, telling our engineering team how to improve the car’s speed.
We have set ourselves some tough goals for next year, but we have to, to make sure we get the return on investment for the team and the sponsors. A top five finish for one of the OzEmail Falcons in at least three rounds will be the minimum we will be looking for.
2002 should be a great year for not only us but for the V8 Supercar championship. We are only two weeks into the off-season but already I’m itching to get back into it.
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