Spotlight: Daniel Klimenko

Melbourne Cup: tick. Bathurst 1000: tick.

All that’s left is the Sydney to Hobart yacht race to complete a rare family trifecta, laughs Daniel Klimenko.

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Erebus Motorsport owner Betty Klimenko is known to be a popular if quirky character; her husband is just as fascinating.

A businessman born and raised in Sydney, he is often spotted around the Penrite Racing camp – as evidenced by the docuseries Inside Line: A Season with Erebus Motorsport.

His role?

“My position is I don’t have one,” he tells Supercars.com.

“I actually try to do that for everything I do. I hate titles, I hate garbage like that.

“I mean if I’m not needed, I don’t do anything. If I’m needed, I’ll do something.

“I don’t get caught in pigeonholes of that’s what you do and that’s the guy to see. I don’t want to be that guy. I’m more of a solutions person.”

It’s that kind of ideology that led to Klimenko being assigned to refuelling duties one year at the Bathurst 12 Hour, when now Erebus CEO Barry Ryan first joined the team.

“He just thought I was one of the guys, so ‘there you go, there’s a racesuit, you’re suiting up’,” Klimenko recalls.

“Later on he found out and was like ‘I’ll find someone else’ and I was like ‘no I’m happy to do it’, that’s the nature, if you need someone, I’m here.

“You can’t stand there and go ‘I can’t get my hands dirty or I don’t want to do that’. You can’t expect someone to do something you won’t do if you can.”

Klimenko, 50, grew up in a sports-mad family, himself playing rugby league and rugby union on a single weekend.

He even trialled as a junior for South Sydney. The Rabbitohs are his NRL team to this day.

His brother was a representative high jumper; his mother’s side of the family had a long history in horse racing.

Klimenko’s great uncle Jim Pike rode Phar Lap to victory in the 1930 Melbourne Cup.

Nearly nine decades after that famous triumph, Klimenko’s Supercars team won the 2017 Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 with Dave Reynolds and Luke Youlden at the wheel.

“We always giggle and say now all we have to do is the Sydney to Hobart and we’ll have the three big races,” Klimenko adds.

He never could have envisaged a career in motorsport, though.

“Life is about sliding doors, and you go along and a door opens and a door closes and sometimes you go in the right door and sometimes you go in the wrong door,” he explains philosophically.

“Sometimes you think you have gone through a wrong door and it turns out to be the best door possible. Life is funny like that.

“So no, I can’t say that we actually planned it or envisaged it, it just happened.”

After some up-and-down early days in Supercars operating Mercedes from 2013-15, their team has gone from strength to strength since moving to Melbourne and swapping to Holden ahead of the 2016 season.

“That was a journey that we had to go on as well. Right or wrong, a lot came from it,” Klimenko says of the Mercedes era.

Now commercially known as Penrite Racing, the team has become a regular contender for silverware with Reynolds and Anton De Pasquale forming a strong driver line-up.

Doing things a little differently has been the cornerstone of their successes, right from when they purchased Commodores from Walkinshaw Racing for 2016.

“We like to watch what people do but you have got to find your own way, and that’s one thing our team has done throughout motorsport is we tend to take best practice, but then we try to evolve it.

“The Walkinshaw car was a prime example: We took their car and made it better. In plain and simple terms, that is exactly what happened.”

As for his relationship with Betty, Klimenko was just 19 when they got married: “We actually met in a pub in The Rocks, in the good old heydays of smoking indoors and people spilling out of bars.

“She just happened to know a friend I was with and I met her that night and pretty much that was it.

“As much as we both went, ‘na this ain’t going to work’, it worked from day one and we couldn’t deny it.”