SUNDAY SILVIA SESSIONS

INSIDE TJM

ucked away deep within a semi-suburban South Auckland estate is definitely the last place you’d expect to find a race workshop stacked to the hilt with Silvias, but that’s exactly where brothers Troy and Ben Jenkins, aka Team Jenkins Motorsport (TJM) ply their drift trade. The family home is not 50m from the shed, but clearly the Jenkins parentals are supportive of their sons’ activities, allowing their property to act like some kind of drift halfway house, often hosting international drivers and their cars or travelling New Zealand teams.

Like all good race shops, it’s somewhat low-key from the exterior, with the only external clue of what lies within the converted farm buildings the mountain of destroyed Jinyus poking out from behind the shed.

The property was previously home to a prominent speedway family, who first converted the farm sheds to a race workshop — so the muffled bark of SRs and RBs would be a pleasant change of volume for the surrounding neighbours, compared with the previous sounds of roaring V8 speedway machines.

Once the boys took possession, they got to work making the place their own: cleaning up floors, building benches, and adding storage and a hoist. The workshop is split across two buildings. The smaller of the two is where all the mechanical grunt work goes down, and is complete with a hoist and every tool a drifter needs. The larger shop serves as storage and an assembly area. But it’s not all hard work and grease-stained hands — there’s a lounge in the corner and a well-stocked fridge — any workshop with a dual-door drinks fridge is clearly serious about its live-stream motorsport watching.

The first thing you’ll notice is how clean and well organized the space is. It’s a proper race-shop layout and gets used like one. You can bet the boys know exactly where everything is and to which car it belongs.

Alongside the Jenkins’ own comp cars, it’s a revolving door of different projects owned by the TJM crew. There’s always something to work on, even if the comp cars are just gathering dust. But, come race season, the shop works like a welllubricated machine.

Running a two-car team in the national championship is no easy feat. It takes many hands, many late nights, and a whole lot of determination from the entire team to make it happen. Most nights, you will find anywhere from one to 10-plus sets of hands going hard and making that dream happen. Having such a vast shop allows them to give back to their crew members, who work for nothing, by offering up the shed for them to work on their own machines.

Current projects on the go include a clean S14, powered