Eaton eyes Australian Supercars as she secures test in Super2 machinery
Grand Tour TV series test driver Abbie Eaton will head to Australia at the end of the month to test a Super2 car in a bid to forge a career in the Supercars series.
Eaton has raced sporadically this year while working on The Grand
Tour alongside Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond.
The 26-year-old won the British Racing and Sports Car Club’s Mazda MX-5 Supercup in 2014 before outings in series such as British GT.
This year she has driven a 1983 Holden Commodore V8 Supercar replica owned by her father, Paul, in historic meetings.
She will head out to Australia for a month and visit the final round of both series, at the Newcastle street circuit on November 23-25.
“It’s all been worked on throughout this year,” said Eaton. “I have two Australian managers out there, Jo Gardner and Peter Doulman, who have been involved in Supercars for years, one of them has come out of retirement just to help out.
“We’ll go for a test and if it is successful, the plan is to hopefully do a year of Super2 next year, or work towards doing that. I watched it [Supercars] as a kid, it’s one of those championships that if it’s on the TV, you can’t just walk past it. The cars are really difficult to drive and it takes a lot of skill to get the most out of them. There’s no driver aids, you’re driving by the seat of your pants.”