TEAM 18 PROFILEWORDS Bruce Newton IMAGES Peter Norton, James Baker
hen you boil it all down, the key question for Charlie
Schwerkolt is... why? Why put yourself through all this
effort, expense and pain to be a Supercars team owner?
It’s a question he’s clearly been asked before because his
answer comes back quickly and definitively.
“Owning my own team is a good thing,” he says simply.
“It’s the best thing I have done by far because we have had
control of our destiny. I am really enjoying my racing and going out there and
having a crack.”
Schwerkolt is the owner of Team 18 (Preston Hire Racing). It’s been around for
less than two seasons yet has managed to cram a Netflix TV series worth of drama
and incident into that time. And the viewers would probably dismiss it as fiction.
Just creating a Supercars team from scratch was challenge enough, but then
throw in the Darwin accident, driver Lee Holdsworth’s injuries, a wrecked car
and the budget damage inflicted buying a replacement, a gut-wrenching Bathurst
start-line failure, this year’s Australian Grand Prix torpedoing by a brakeless Nick
Percat and much more and you can begin to understand the immensity of the
hurdles Schwerkolt and his small band have overcome to be on the grid.
“Sometimes through 2016 I was thinking, ‘What have I done, what am I doing,
In an era of super teams in Supercars, there is still room for privateer
customer outfits that punch above their weight. Charlie Schwerkolt’s
Team 18 and driver Lee Holdsworth are certainly doing that.
Team 18 is one of the
smallest in Supercars.