Ken Gratton•22 Sept 2012

NEWS

Kelly Brothers gearing up for 2013

Nissan V8 ready for the dyno and Altima race car close to track testing

The days are numbered for Kelly Racing's VE Commodores. Only five rounds of the V8 Supercars fixture for 2012 remain, with the high-profile Bathurst event just weeks away. From next year the series makes the leap to a new formula – 'Car of the Future' – but Kelly Racing has already announced that it will campaign the Nissan Altima next year anyway. That signals the parting of the ways for Holden and brothers Todd and Rick.

In the months since the announcement, the team's migration to the Nissan fold has been thoroughly analysed by the specialist media. Until the team unveils the Altima there seems little more to add. But with the Kelly Commodores' swansong looming an opportunity opened up to interview Todd Kelly the Friday of the Sandown 500, and take the passenger seat for two quick laps of the track in one of the redoubtable Jack Daniels Commodores. It was an opportunity too good to pass up.

First, the drive...

Official practice had concluded for the day, so we were all clear for the brief run around the track. Getting in and out of the Commodore was a much easier task than climbing into the Volvo S60 race car this correspondent tried out for size back in June. Having learned my lesson with the Volvo, I declined a crew member's suggestion to dive into the car headfirst. Instead I placed my right foot on the alloy plate there to brace myself under brakes. Then it was a matter of swinging the body around and backwards into the seat, before lifting the left leg over a roll cage member and placing the left foot on the same plate.

There's more room to move body parts around to contort and shift into tight spots in the Commodore. The seat on the passenger's side of the car (left side here) proved much more accommodating than the passenger's seat in the Volvo. One does not feel like one's hips are being squeezed in a pair of giant vice grips in the Commodore...

A crew member strapped me into the seat and struggled to secure the belts in the buckle. He was hauling down on the straps over my shoulders and asking whether I was okay. I answered that I was, only for him to proceed giving both shoulder straps another firm tug – or two. When fastening the harness in a race car optimal safety is apparently achieved only when the occupant would complain of discomfort, but can't draw breath to do so.

All thoughts of compromised respiration were cast aside once Todd fired up the engine and eased the car away from the pits. With my head packed into a helmet the roar from the engine was muted, but conspicuous nonetheless. First gear seemed very high and required a fair amount of clutch slip for a clean start – without a full-tilt race launch.

We were off down the main straight, headed for the first corner. Todd braked moderately hard and turned the car left into the corner. From there we rocketed up a short straight to the esses, followed by turn four, a left-hander onto the back straight. Compared with the Volvo in Gothenburg the Commodore rides higher and rolls more, but the Volvo is a silhouette formula car with a 3.5-litre V6 mounted behind the driver, in a spaceframe and driving through to the rear wheels. It was a more sophisticated race car than the Commodore, but it was much further from production standard too.

Todd was picking lines that took us over the kerbs at the apex of each corner. The kerbs seem massive in contrast with those in Sweden. But the Commodore's better wheel articulation meant the car absorbed the impact fairly well and since there's little load on the inside wheels the vertical movement was a bounce into the air, rather than an out and out impact.

On the back straight there was time to check out the cockpit and get a feel for the car. Given the VE body shell has doors that actually open and close, just like the production car, it felt a pretty tight chassis. There was very little of the bang, clatter, shake, rattle and roll you might expect from a car built this way. Todd was reading off information from a basic-looking LCD that sat within a conventional instrument shroud. The sequential-shift gear lever had a dog leg and was longer than I expected. The rest of the spartan cabin was finished in matt black, but the pedals featured white plastic facings.

Todd was on the brakes hard at the end of the back straight. The G forces were enough to make your eyes water and bulge at the same time, but the braking was probably not much heavier than we've experienced in road-registered AMG Mercedes models at Albert Park. That said, the V8 Supercar's brakes can handle that sort of abuse all day – and from higher speeds too.

More kerb bashing ensued before we returned to the main straight and Todd took the car around for one more lap before we pitted. It was all over so quickly.

The Commodore's engine noise died and peace descended. After a particularly inelegant exit from the car, which I requested the motoring.com.au video editing crew leave on the cutting room floor, I donned the sponsor's jacket and posed for photos alongside Todd. Now roles were reversed, with Todd on my turf as we took seats for a brief interview.

Getting down to the serious stuff...

Having just experienced the old-formula Commodore, I was curious as to how the Nissan Altima – built in accordance with Car of the Future rules – was shaping up?

"We've obviously taken on a huge task to get a standard road car and mould it around a V8 Supercar chassis and the V8 Supercar rules," Todd replied. "So there's been a lot of design work on the body work [and] a lot of discussion between our engineering group and V8 Supercars to make sure that every little thing that we do with the car, design-wise, will fit what they want to do with the rules. At the same time we have to get Nissan's approval to do all that, so the simple things, like clearing the rear guards slightly, to match the dimensions is quite a process..."

"The timeframe we've had, to go through all that, has been pretty cramped. We're at the point now where we've actually designed the whole car and most of the parts are ready to bolt on the car... And the same thing with the engine; taking a standard road car block and cylinder [heads] and turn [them] into an engine that's capable of producing the same power as a purpose-built Supercar engine is not a big challenge. We're hopefully going to fire that up within the next few days, for the first time on the dyno.

"It's been a huge process through the year and at times I think: 'Jeez, is it all going to happen?', because we've only got pictures on a computer at that point. But now, in the last month, it's really started to develop and all the bits that we've been drawing – you can actually pick up the parts and physically see them, and put things together.

"Now is the point where the whole thing has just started to come together and there's a bit of light at the end of the tunnel."

Kelly Racing has faced some considerable hurdles, Todd explained, in adapting the Nissan for Car of the Future regs next year. Virtually none of the existing (Commodore) structure can be carried over into the Altima, but all teams currently competing in V8SC and planning to campaign next year are in that same boat.

"It's a control roll cage for the Car of the Future [formula]," Todd explained, "so every single team has the exact same roll cage and you put the skin of the manufacturer's car on that... We've spent a fair bit of time working out actually where to position the road car body on the roll cage. Basically, anything that we've got in our team now – in this [Commodore] – is irrelevant for next year. It's all completely new, even all the running gear is different from what we've run this year..."

It sounds like an arduous slog to bring the Altima to this point. Was it?

"We've been very lucky that the Altima really lends itself to becoming a V8 Supercar," Todd replied. "The dimensions of the car... on this car [the current Commodore] we have to cut 93mm through the rear door and through the roof skin and shorten the car. The Ford is the same; you've got to change the length of the car a bit to actually fit the race car wheelbase.

"On the Nissan we've centred the back of the car around the rear wheel – and the whole car fits almost perfectly. All we've had to do is slightly stretch the front guard and slightly widen the rear guard. Other than that it sort of all fell into place.

"We've been really lucky that there hasn't been any massive 'oh no, what do we do here?' stumbling blocks as far as getting the car to fit the rules. It's been really smooth sailing in that respect."

From an outsider's perspective it seems like it should be a massive undertaking, reconfiguring a front-wheel drive bodyshell for a rear-drive racing car, but that's not the case, Todd explained.

"It's only the external bodywork, though, that we've put on for the race car. All of the running gear, the rear suspension and everything next year is the same for all the cars. We're just taking basically the bodykit and putting it on the control chassis."

So the development of the car itself seems to be in hand then, but what about infrastructure and support? Training technicians and pit crew, even assembling a workshop's worth of the right tools for the car?

"We've done all the design for the car," Todd responded. "Now that it's all come together and we're starting to assemble the first car, we're going through all those exact things. Like you'd normally pull the front of the car off – the headlights and the steel brace across the front, and lift the engine up and out... On this car the engine sits so far back under the windscreen, because the windscreen's so far forward, you've only got a couple of millimetres between that and the cage. So on the new car we've actually got to drop the [supporting] crossmember out and pull the engine out and down – forwards.

"So... a normal engine crane to lift the engine up is not going to work. We're looking at little forklift things or little platforms that go in and actually drop the engine down and out. So... it's not just the car... it's all the tooling... How you work on the car is completely different to what we've learned.

"We're really training everyone up from scratch. It'd be like the whole team almost going overseas and working in a different category; the car will be so different. It's just little things like that...

"We've got a very detailed book for all the cars – on how to do everything on this car... like how to change a damper, how to change an engine..."

There has clearly been a lot of work on the car going on in camera, but when can the fans expect to see it? It's unlikely to be unveiled to the public in its sponsors' livery until January or February next year, Todd said.

"We're not far off – within the next month or two – getting a car running and doing all the aero testing, which will be just a generic livery, it won't be Jack Daniels..."

With all the portents looking good, will other teams – or new teams – move to Nissan?

"We put four cars on the grid, straight away," Todd answered. "It all depends on one, whether the team wants to do it without the funding, or [two] whether Nissan wants to find a bit more money to spend in V8 Supercars to expand with more cars...

"But given that we've done all the work... for us to supply [another team] with all the cars and the engines to do it wouldn't be much more [difficult]. We've ordered enough parts to build 18 engines to run next year and we're building six chassis, so to expand on that – to put more Nissans on the grid for us – isn't particularly hard at all. Our whole facility has been geared up to handle this project pretty much all in-house..."

So would the team take on more work, consulting to other race teams making the move to Nissan, if that should happen?

"It's not our priority," said Todd. "The biggest thing we're trying to do is get ourselves a really good car next year; we've sacrificed a fair bit of engineering resource this year on making sure we come out of the gates next year really strong.

"You could easily get wrapped up in wanting to sell cars and engines to the rest of the field, but we keep reminding ourselves what the business is that we're in – and that's racing cars and trying to win races. Anything peripheral to that that could lessen our competitiveness we won't want to push for..."

It's plain that the relationship between the team and Nissan has been fruitful so far, but what about Holden? Kelly Racing is finishing 2012 running cars that will be put out to pasture next year – along with long-standing support from Fishermans Bend. That must surely call for some careful diplomatic footwork... How have relations with Holden been since the Nissan announcement?

"They've been good," Todd replied. "Really, I've had 15 years under contract to Holden and while we were in discussions with Nissan we were in discussions with Holden, because to do what we're doing with Nissan is a huge undertaking... design the cars, design the engines and build all that. The cost is obviously quite high.

"When Nissan [was] interested to talk about it we had to give Holden first option and try and get some funding from them as a manufacturer after a 15-year relationship. In the end they had committed to the team that they had and, hadn't got the budget to go any further. They understand what position we're in – it's either sink or swim in this game – and if we can't get the support that Triple-8 and FPR and HRT can, well we can't compete against them. So we had no choice; we could either run non-competitive almost as a private [team]... or do something else.

"[Holden] were extremely good about it; we actually had a few meetings with them through that process and got their blessing. And the relationship we've had with them since the announcement has been very amicable I suppose – as good as you could hope for."

Holden is one thing, but the Holden fans (and their Ford-following counterparts) are quite another. Just how hot was the reaction from the fan base when news broke the team was moving to Nissan?

"Initially the media tried to put their own slant on that," Todd said, "which made me a little bit nervous – and we actually had our first test day here after the announcement, and I was almost too scared to walk out of the garage... the amount of people here waiting for a bit of aggro. But people started coming up and saying: 'That's awesome, well done... can't wait to see another manufacturer in the category'."

According to Todd, even die-hard Holden fans wished them well – but often qualified their feedback with the observation 'we're not going to follow you there'.

"The backlash would be lucky to be one or two people; we've had one person ring up and want to cancel their membership with the team – and that one phone call... somehow the media got onto it and it just blew out of proportion."

Todd believes that Nissan's 20-year absence from the category has left some fans wanting and hoping for a return – or at very least an expansion of the category beyond just the current two-horse race. And it's a different sort of following these days too. Teams and drivers count more than the cars; a point that Todd obliquely mentions.

"All of mine and Rick's supporters over the years have been unbelievable."

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Written byKen Gratton

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