BLAZING A TRAIL ON THE COAST
The Grand Tour show test driver Abbie Eaton is hitting the Coast to try to crack Supercars
BRITISH racing car driver Abbie
is using the Gold Coast as a springboard into a Supercars drive. Eaton, with multiple championships in other racing disciplines to her name and the test driver for The Grand Tour show with
(formerly Top Gear), is spending the weekend on the Coast doing laps with Supercars veteran
She’s come via Melbourne where she logged time with the Walkinshaw Andretti United team as part of a bid to eventually get a drive in the Supercars Championship. She’s prepared to earn her stripes on the secondtier Super2 tour for several years but hopes to join Supercars’ sole female driver
one day. Eaton tells ATG she landed The Grand Tour gig last year after blitzing lap times on a test day in six different cars and has been a fixture since alongside Clarkson, and
Eaton Clarkson Paul Morris. Simona de Silvestro Jeremy James May Richard Hammond.
“What you see is what you get with them,” she says of the Amazon Prime show’s colourful stars. “Jeremy is the male version of me. We all get on really well, we all work together, have a laugh together and have a good crack.”
But her Gold Coast trip is purely to hone her Supercars skills.
“I’m here to focus on the job which is being as quick as I can in the car. “I want to learn to surf but the test day is on the last day of the trip and I feel I may injure myself (surfing) so I may save it for the next trip maybe.” She will do a test drive with Matt Jones Racing on Tuesday. DEFENCE lawyer admits he “just about fell of my chair” when reading up on Melbourne’s scandal. Incredulous at revelations Victoria Police had deployed a gang-land lawyer as an informant to bring down her own clients, he says: “It’s like being a doctor and a murderer at the same time. I was going ‘No, that can’t be right’. Even with some of the idiots we have practising law around here, not even they would be that stupid.”