Some drivers take a while to nominate their favourite race car. Garth Tander only needs a second to name his.
“It was the 2007 Championship winner, for sure,” replies the five-time Bathurst 1000 conqueror. “I won a lot of races in it, so it was the most successful Supercar of my career, in terms of wins and podiums.”
It sure was. From the 37 races in the championship, Tander took 19 podium finishes – and 15 of those results were wins.
Tander and HSV Dealer Team team-mate Rick Kelly, who had won the title the previous year, were driving Holden’s new Commodore VE racer, developed by Walkinshaw Performance for them and the factory Holden Racing Team.
“We were, probably unfairly, compared to HRT,” Tander says. “We were probably lighter and more nimble that what HRT were able to be, with them being the size of a factory team. We were pretty much a customer team that got to use the same toys as them.
“We used to joke at the time that we were Toro Rosso and they were Red Bull! That is how we operated as a team; that was different to the actual cars, the hardware we had was all the same. We didn’t operate on the same budget or have the same resources as HRT but we also benefitted from a lot of the work they did.”
The model change brought with it challenges for the teams but there were also parts carried over from the previous VZ model.
Source: Autosport