In a 30-year profession spanning Europe, Japan and Australia it takes James Courtney an impressively quick period of time to appoint Garth Tander as his favorite team-mate.
When Courtney and Dick Johnson Racing have been combating for the 2010 V8 Supercars title, behind the scenes it was something however clean crusing. Workforce house owners Dick Johnson and Charlie Schwerkolt have been at loggerheads and earlier than the championship showdown at Sydney Olympic Park, Courtney and his supervisor Alan Gow had a deal in place for him to affix the Holden Racing Workforce for 2011, a transfer confirmed the week following his coronation.
The factor was, the Walkinshaw family-owned Holden works staff already had a longtime lead driver – 2007 champion Tander. Many questioned how and if two alpha male drivers in the identical storage would get on. The reply was, and is, “very well”.
“When it was introduced that I used to be going to HRT, everybody was saying that we might not get on,” asserts Courtney, who will name time on his racing profession on the finish of subsequent season. “I bear in mind actually early on, I realised that we had the identical sense of humour, and he’s really a extremely humorous, good bloke. He acts like another person when he’s on TV!
“The primary day, we have been speaking about issues like motion pictures. We preferred the identical motion pictures, he was pulling out the film strains I used to be about then, and I assumed, ‘you might be really an alright bloke, and never the arsehole I assumed you have been going to be!’
“There was a extremely good stage of respect between the 2 of us. He has had an incredible profession and I respect what he has achieved a lot. He is an efficient, exhausting however truthful racer.”
Courtney (proper) and Tander shared an identical style in movies and shortly related at HRT in 2011
Picture by: Alastair Staley / Motorsport Photographs
The Courtney-Tander partnership netted no additional titles. Courtney peaked with sixth in 2014 and Tander by inserting fifth in 2011. It continued till the top of 2016, when Tander departed for Garry Rogers Motorsport. However Courtney’s respect for Tander, who retired from full-time Supercars competitors in 2018, stays sturdy as we speak.
Garth Tander’s favorite automobile:
“We had quirks with the automobiles that we like in another way, however we did not ever argue concerning the path that the automobile ought to be moving into,” provides Courtney. “We at all times wished to steer it in the identical path.
“Even now, we type of gravitate in the direction of one another. We’re about the identical age, we each have children, now we have quite a bit in widespread. He can be the man I might do Bathurst with, out of everybody.”
“There was a extremely good stage of respect between the 2 of us. He is an efficient, exhausting however truthful racer” James Courtney
As for his favorite automobile, despite two large testing crashes at Monza and Silverstone in 2002, and by no means attending to drive it in a race, Courtney nonetheless has affection for the Jaguar R3-Cosworth.
“I do know it tried to kill me!” he smiles 22 years later. “It was the head; nothing has ever matched the velocity, matched the joys. If anybody mentioned that I might drive one automobile from my profession once more – and I might be sure it wasn’t going to interrupt! – it might be that one. It was simply mind-boggling.”
Courtney says he would choose Tander as his primary option to race at Bathurst with
Picture by: Daniel Kalisz / Motorsport Photographs
