Some drivers take a while to nominate their favourite race car. Garth Tander only needs a second to name his.
“It was the 2007 Championship winner, for sure,” replies the five-time Bathurst 1000 conqueror. “I won a lot of races in it, so it was the most successful Supercar of my career, in terms of wins and podiums.”
It sure was. From the 37 races in the championship, Tander took 19 podium finishes – and 15 of those results were wins.
Tander and HSV Dealer Team team-mate Rick Kelly, who had won the title the previous year, were driving Holden’s new Commodore VE racer, developed by Walkinshaw Performance for them and the factory Holden Racing Team.
“We were, probably unfairly, compared to HRT,” Tander says. “We were probably lighter and more nimble that what HRT were able to be, with them being the size of a factory team. We were pretty much a customer team that got to use the same toys as them.
“We used to joke at the time that we were Toro Rosso and they were Red Bull! That is how we operated as a team; that was different to the actual cars, the hardware we had was all the same. We didn’t operate on the same budget or have the same resources as HRT but we also benefitted from a lot of the work they did.”
The model change brought with it challenges for the teams but there were also parts carried over from the previous VZ model.
“The architecture was a bit different to what we had the year prior, with the VZ, so far as the floorpan and so on,” says Tander. “But once we got our head around it, we thought, ‘This thing is going to be good’.
“We built the prototype car initially and then three for the season, so that one was WR-004 – realistically the third VE race car that we built at Walkinshaw’s. And it was a good buggy.
“That was probably also a result of the fact that my engineer at the time, Matty Nielsen, was also the Project Leader at Walkinshaw’s on the VE. While he did not have any advantage over the other engineers the VE program was very much his baby. That worked in our favour.
“It was the 2007 Championship winner, for sure. I won a lot of races in it, so it was the most successful Supercar of my career, in terms of wins and podiums” Garth Tander
“In your career you have a lot of times when you can’t get a car to work. On this occasion, we just rolled it out and it felt good straight away.
“Once we got it in the window, we didn’t have to change it that much. We just tuned small little tweaks and it was fast everywhere we took it. It was like those pair of comfortable boots, or runners. It just feels right.”
By the end of the season, the results spoke for themselves. Tander fought out the title with Jamie Whincup’s Triple Eight Ford, winning with 625 points to the Ford driver’s 623. In the Teams title, HSVDT ruled, 1177 to Triple Eight’s 1134.
The following year Tander and his team manager Rob Crawford moved to HRT, Paul Dumbrell replacing Tander. The WR-004 car is now restored to its 2007 specs and is in the hands of a Queensland collector.
