SPEEDCAFE: You talked earlier about making mistakes as a V8 team owner. Nissan has been vocal about feeling like they’ve been guinea pigs as the first ones in with a new marque under Car of the Future. You were equally first in with them. Do you also feel that way?
KLIMENKO: Yes, I do. When we came into Car of the Future, we were told that the Car of the Future would be here for 10 years before it was changed.
That’s why I invested the amount of money that I did, because I was assured that this was the future and it’s what V8s were going to look like for the next 10 years.
SPEEDCAFE: Do you regret in hindsight going with the Mercedes-AMG package? That was obviously a lot bigger investment and project than say staying with Ford?
KLIMENKO: That’s a good question. Where I made my mistakes was that I didn’t do my homework enough.
Every other team took for granted everything that was given to them as part of being a factory team, from the (road) cars that their drivers drove to all of the parts for the race cars.
You don’t think about it, it just happens year in, year out. If you have to put a price value on that and add it onto what I thought I was up for, I didn’t understand at the time how much that would impact me.
Do I regret going with HWA/AMG? I don’t, because at the time the people who I made the deals with were highly invested into the idea. They loved the idea.
But as with all businesses these people moved up the ladder, other people took their places and it wasn’t as easy to deal with these people.
But it did make me stronger and it made me bring the whole thing back to Australia.
I honestly believed at the beginning we could have done it better, or at least more efficiently, because we’re not sending engines across the world.
The Germans didn’t understand V8 racing and I still don’t think they do. I don’t think anyone outside of Australia really understands it.
It’s a category where there’s a second between first and last and there’s 20 odd cars fighting. It would be easy if everyone raced in clear air on different parts of the track, but we don’t.
It’s such a unique spectacle and it’s rare to be out of the pack. You’re all in their sucking each other’s air and you need to understand that when you’re building an engine.
This is why I believed in our engine team and that Ross knew what to do to get the engine moving forward.
We did that and we won at Winton (2014). I know there was some luck involved there, but even the win at Perth (2015), that was a well deserved and well fought win. There was no part of that which was luck.
On that weekend we got everything right and that’s what we need to do more often. But we’re only two and a half years old. We’re still in nappies.
I’m very proud of what we’ve done in two and a half years. There wasn’t five years of work behind closed doors before we took it to the track.