TRADIE Beer Racing’s David Reynolds will make his 200th Supercars round start at this weekend’s ITM Taupo Super400, the first ever Supercars Championship round held at Taupo International Motorsport Park in New Zealand.
In his 199 rounds to date, Reynolds has amassed eight wins and 44 podiums and currently sits fifth in the Drivers Championship after the opening two rounds at Bathurst and Albert Park.
Reynolds will race at Taupo with a slight change to the branding on his No. 20 Camaro, with Tradie Beer replaced with TRADIE branding, promoting the parent company’s lifestyle clothing brand in conjunction with leading NZ retailer The Warehouse which will also have branding on the roof of Reynolds’ Camaro, known as the TRADIE Racing Camaro for the Taupo event.
This weekend sees Supercars cross the Tasman Sea for the first time since 2022, with the tight and twisty Taupo International Motorsport Park replacing the now defunct Pukekohe Park Raceway as New Zealand’s home of Supercars.
DEWALT Racing’s Mark Winterbottom is looking forward to carrying forward his momentum after a second place finish in Race 4 in Melbourne, and a strong start to the year that sees him placed ninth in the drivers standings.
Winterbottom and Reynolds both tasted the Taupo circuit shortly following Round 2 in Melbourne, carrying out a reconnaissance of the track in a local Toyota 86. This will prove to be extra crucial considering teams will have only one practice session to get to grips with the track, with a sole 90 minute session on Friday.
This weekend’s format sees two 60 lap, 200km races on the Dunlop Soft Tyre. Qualifying will be decided by a single 15 minute session followed by a Top Ten Shootout each day. Races 7 and 8 of the championship will not have a minimum fuel drop, opening up strategy to teams to decipher the fastest way home in each race, adding further challenges to the debut round at Taupo.
All the action can be viewed live on Fox Sports and Kayo, check your local guides for further details.
QUOTES
Mark Winterbottom, driver #18 DEWALT Racing Chevrolet Camaro ZL1
“We’re looking forward to going across the ditch to New Zealand and looking forward to a really solid weekend. Taupo, it’s a brand new event, it’s very exciting and with new events comes opportunity.
“No one’s been there, there’s no data and so there’s so many unknowns going into the weekend. I’ve actually driven the track in another car and it is by far one of the toughest tracks that we’ll go to on the calendar this year. It’s tight, it’s twisty, there’s surface changes, there’s drop off, there’s kerbs, there’s all sorts of stuff going on, and then put a supercar in there, 650 horsepower, low grip and moving around. It’s going to be a handful.
“Dunlop have provided us with with some soft tyres, and with two top 10 shootouts, long races as well with no fuel drop number, so strategy’s going to come into play and there’s so much that’s going to play out.
“I’m really excited coming off a podium at the Grand Prix. We’ve had a couple of good weeks to rebuild and keep that momentum, with some new things coming to the team and all that sort of stuff. We’re in a good place and really looking forward to continuing our charge forwards and trying to bring home some trophies, the pressure’s on but we’re ready for the challenge.”
David Reynolds, driver #20 TRADIE Racing Chevrolet Camaro ZL1
“It’s my 200th supercar round, which just means I’ve been around for a long time. That means I’ve done 200 weekends in supercars! and many years and a lot of hard work and a lot of positive stories, a lot of negative stories, a lot of highs, a lot of lows.
“Motorsport is are very hard sport to understand. It’s not like a normal game of football or cricket or tennis where you’ve got a 50 percent chance of winning, because you’re playing one other side. In our sport, there’s 24, 25 blokes, when I first started there was 32 of us vying for positions. So the chances of winning just based on those numbers are quite low. But I’ve had a really good journey so far and I’m going to continue on with these awesome guys at Team 18. It’s going to be, going to be a fun 200th round.
“It’s our first time going to Taupo as a category. I raced there 15 years ago in Carrera Cup and I remember it being a very hard track to drive, very hard on tyres and quite ‘Mickey Mouse’. There’s a lot of corners that lead into other corners, so you’ve actually got to think about what you’re doing out there. It’s going to be very hard in a supercar because the surface is quite old. There are a few parts that have been resurfaced, but as a whole it’s quite an old surface. It’s a very, very old surface, so the tyre deg is going to be extremely high.
“It’s going to be a very hard track to set your car up for, one, for qualifying, for doing a fast lap, and then two, for the longevity of the tyre over the race. We’ve got two 200 kilometre races there and it’s going to be flat out.
“I’ve done two rounds with Team 18 and it’s been really, really fun. Bathurst went really well, we had a lot of pace and the Grand Prix went okay, we didn’t have a lot of pace but ended up fifth overall in the standings. It shows our consistency is quite good, but we need to work on our car speed depending on what tracks we go to.
“Taupo is going to be different again because no one really knows what to expect or how to set the car up or they’ve got no preconceived idea of what’s going to happen. It’s going to be really interesting to find out what team sort of goes there and performs. But we’re third in the team’s points, which is unreal and I’m fifth in the championship still so it’s been a great start.
“There’s a massive sellout crowd for this round, It’s going to be huge. Anytime you do a race in New Zealand, it’s always really big. New Zealand fans love racing, alot of them grow up with racing in their background, in their family. They don’t have a lot of other sports, they have rugby and racing. So racing is a big part of their life and it really shows every time you go to a track there. It’s just welcomed by everyone and they are very knowledgeable and they know everything about our sport, it’s actually a really cool place to go racing.”