Something a little obscure for Repco’s The Garage this story, but a feel good one.
When Improved Production supported the Repco Supercars Championship at Sydney Motorsport Park back in November there was an unfortunate incident for Victorian Daniel Timewell as he collided heavily with Dan Ridley’s VK Commodore exiting Turn 3.
Miraculously, Timewell is back competing this weekend in a new VF Commodore this weekend at Sandown’s Victorian State Circuit Racing Championship opener.
“The other car ended up being a total loss,” said Timewell. “It was too bent and buckled to rebuild, so we went to the wreckers and bought a new VF Commodore shell.
“Then started the process.”
An experienced boat racer, Timewell turned his attention to circuit racing a few seasons ago competing originally in Sports Sedans before converting his VF Commodore to conform to Improved Production regulations.
Having taken the learnings out of the original, Timewell began to build its replacement.
“We did a little bit differently this time,” he explained.
“We acid dipped the whole shell to make sure we got every bit of sound deadener out of just to cut down on weight because the VF Commodore is a traditionally heavy car. It still is, but we thought we’d start with a blank canvas and away we went from there.
“It was a shame we crashed the car last year and total lost it because we were making ground with it.”
Many of the advancements from the first VF Commodore were able to be directly transplanted into the new chassis where Timewell will be part of a large Improved Production contingent.
“We started a lot of the developments on the last car,” said Timewell.
“We did a big suspension upgrade, the brakes were improved and we fitted a Holinger gearbox, so all those things we started to develop in the old car.
“We’ve tried to pick up from where we left off.”
The time to transform the bodyshell to race car was relatively swift.
“It was really three months from start to finish, but most of the time factor was getting the shell prepared, getting it caged out, making sure it was all square and true,” Timewell detailed.
“We only really started out with a caged out shell three weeks ago and I though there was no way known that we were going to race this weekend, but Colin my main man had all the confidence. I don’t think he slept for a couple of weeks, but we’ve put in some massive hours here and we’ve had a lot of help from a lot of people.”
Go well Daniel!