Tekno Autosports team boss Steve Hallam has farewelled Triple Eight-bound Shane van Gisbergen with a ringing endorsement.
Hallam, who as a Formula One engineer worked with Ayrton Senna, as well as working in NASCAR before moving to Australia four years ago, has been with the New Zealander for the last two years.
Van Gisbergen will become Jamie Whincup’s team-mate in the Red Bull Racing Australia team for the 2016 V8 Supercars Championship, racing a Triple Eight-built and developed Holden Commodore VF.
“In the two years I have worked with Shane he has been integral to the team,” said Hallam, who is always cautious and considered in his public utterances about motor racing.
“He really is one of us, he isn’t separate to the team nor does he operate in parallel to the team.
“He hangs out with us and while I am not saying that is a prerequisite, it does help you accelerate the embedding of the driver into any organisation.
“He tells it like it is, he acknowledges if the car is good, so we stop fiddling with it. And we don’t fiddle with the car a lot. He knows what he needs and he can articulate that to Geoff (Slater) our engineer and Geoff is very good at translating that.”
Van Gisbergen ended his three-year relationship with Tekno by winning the 250km finale to the 2015 championship at the Coates Hire Sydney 500.
It was the third year in a row he had won the Sunday race at the Homebush circuit.
He has also qualified for every ARMOR ALL Top 10 Shootout conducted in the last three years.
Beyond V8 Supercars he has also starred in local and international GT racing, including with the semi-factory von Ryan Racing GT3 team in Europe, which was a drive Hallam helped set up.
“He is an absolute pleasure to work with and I think a lot of that is reflected in the stuff that he does outside of V8 Supercars,” Hallam said.
“He has established himself at McLaren as a GT driver; Two victories this year in the Blancpain series. He has driven (Tekno sponsor) Tony Quinn’s McLaren to victory at Highlands (in New Zealand). He is an exceptionally capable and talented driver.”
But Hallam declined to define that praise more explicitly.
“I don’t want to knee-jerk anything out because drivers come in all shapes and sizes and they are all different.
“And thy all have different ways of expressing what good looks like or how they are feeling, or how professional they are, how quick they are.
“There are a lot of facets to what it takes to be a good driver.”
In his time with Tekno van Gisbergen has won nine races and qualified on pole nine times. Hallam admitted the full record did not really hit team members until they posed together with some of the trophies accumulated during that period.
“It was ‘have we done all this together just us?’ And that was very satisfying indeed. We will all – Shane included – treasure those photos.”
Hallam joined Tekno after two high pressure years at Walkinshaw Racing, restructuring one of the giants of Australian motorsport. He moved on when fellow Englishman Adrian Burgess was hired by team owner Ryan Walkinshaw to be managing director for 2014.
Tekno is a completely different proposition to WR. Owned by the Webb family, it runs only one car with a small crew and works closely with Triple Eight on technical development.
“We have all had a really good time together,” Hallam said of the last two years. “It’s certainly something that I have enjoyed … We have had the same crew for two years with one exception and it’s been a pleasure getting to know them and work with them in this environment.
“We genuinely are a small team. We all do a lot of stuff to get through our daily work and it has been extremely satisfying over the last couple of years – and I hope it continues – to win the number of races we have.”
Hallam confirmed that he would return for a third season with Tekno in 2016 and expected the current crew to be there as well. Will Davison takes over driving duties from van Gisbergen and the team will share a boom with Craig Lowndes and Team Vortex, tightening the ties even further with T8.
But Hallam said that change would not impact on the way Tekno goes about its business. For instance, van Gisbergen has been driving a 2013-14 spec T8 Commodore this year with a couple of key updates.
“One of the keys to the success of our team is we spend wisely,” he said.
“The car we are racing has one or two things that are 2015 spec that only us and Triple Eight have. And they are important things.
“I know some people will talk about how we don’t have the latest uprights. That is true. Am I losing sleep about it? No I am not. People fixate on the wrong things.
“And when I say we spend wisely, we pick and choose what we spend our money on. We work closely with Triple Eight. They know our rationale and they get it.
“The competitiveness of our car could be better but it is very good. In bang for your buck terms I don’t know if there is any one doing a better job.”
