Saturday Sleuthing: JR's first V8 Supercar

Jason Richards holds a special place in the hearts and minds of the V8 Supercar community and today on Saturday Sleuthing we decided to take a trip back down memory lane and go searching for his very first V8 Supercar – the original Team Kiwi Commodore.

The Jason Richards Memorial Trophy will be on the line next weekend at the ITM 500 Auckland at Pukekohe with Richards’ old teammate and sponsor/car number combination – Jason Bright and the #8 Team BOC Commodore – the defending trophy winners.

Richards passed away in December 2011 from a very rare form of cancer and the Pukekohe trophy is a standing tribute to the gutsy and talented Kiwi who was last year inducted into the V8 Supercars Hall of Fame.

So where did the V8 Supercar chapter of Richards’ racing career start?

It goes back to 2000 when a new team known as Team Kiwi Racing was assembled by David John to join the V8 Supercars Championship.

A Perkins Engineering-built car was secured for the ‘All-Black’ team’s arrival into the Championship after initially planning to enter with an ex-Tony Longhurst Falcon.

The car that TKR secured was PE chassis #035 – it had been built new in late 1999 and debuted on the Gold Coast and then raced at Bathurst with Larry Perkins and Russell Ingall driving, finishing seventh.

Perkins had driven it in the first part of the 2000 Championship with a distinctive black livery adorning the front end of the famous #11 Castrol Commodore before it was sold to TKR.

Richards – who had been racing for Team Kiwi in the New Zealand Touring Car Championship and prior to that with Lyall Williamson’s BMW squad – made his V8 Supercar debut in the FAI 1000 at Bathurst with countryman Angus Fogg as co-driver of the #777 entry.

They finished a very creditable 16th on Team Kiwi’s (and their own) V8 Supercar debut in a field of 55 cars in a race well remembered for being run in the wet after the entire pre-race lead up had been marred by rain.

Team Kiwi retained the car for 2001 and it was re-numbered #021 (in deference to sponsor Vodafone and the dialling prefix for mobile phones in New Zealand, if you were wondering!) and Richards piloted it for the season.

It was updated from VT to VX specification and again Fogg co-drove at Bathurst, though he crashed heavily at The Cutting in practice, prompting a Saturday night/Sunday morning rebuild that saw the car start from pit lane with the finishing touches only just applied.

The fact they finished 16th – the same position as 12 months earlier – was impressive given the damage to the rear of the car after the accident. 

The V8 Supercars Championship headed to New Zealand for the first time later in 2001 and Richards gave the home town fans something to cheer for in the rain-affected opening race where he finished a then-career-best fourth place in the first of three races for that weekend.

Greg Murphy may have won the weekend overall on the championship’s first points-paying visit to Pukekohe, but the #021 Richards car had attracted plenty of attention from ‘those in the know’ too.

Richards again raced the car as #021 in the 2002 V8 Supercars Championship, with the car based in Melbourne.

He departed for Team Dynamik at the end of the season with Craig Baird joining TKR, though the team began 2003 in a technical tie-up with Garry Rogers Motorsport and Baird drove one of the team’s VX Commodores until the deal quickly fell apart.

That sent Baird back into the original TKR Commodore for Winton and Darwin before moving into the upgraded sister chassis (PE 036 for those playing along at home!) for the remainder of the season.

The original TKR car was then sent to New Zealand to be used as a ride car for the next few seasons and the V8 Sleuth spotted it in 2008 when in Hamilton for the inaugural street event there.

V8Xtra was filming a post-round episode from TKR’s Hamilton workshop and the Sleuth snapped a photo of the car sitting in a 2006 livery – the style as raced by Paul Radisich in a Paul Morris Motorsports-built car.

It next appeared online for sale on Trade Me (the Kiwi version of eBay) in 2011 with a range of spare parts offered with it, but our leads on this chassis stop at that point. 

Did someone end up doing a deal to buy it? Is it still in New Zealand? Would someone be keen to purchase it and restore it if it was still up for sale?

They are just some of the questions that relate to this car – if any Saturday Sleuthing readers (particularly those based in New Zealand) have any leads or information, we’d love to hear what has happened to Jason Richards’ first Team Kiwi Racing Commodore.

Contact the V8 Sleuth via the following methods:Email: [email protected]Twitter: http://twitter.com/v8sleuthFacebook: www.facebook.com/v8sleuthTo visit the V8 Sleuth’s website: www.v8sleuth.com.au

Have a safe and relaxing Easter weekend and enjoy the ITM 500 Auckland at Pukekohe.