John Mcgregor and Geoff Slater
After scaling the heights of Mount Panorama, two top Supercars engineers are taking on a fresh challenge in sportscars
Conquering Mount Panorama is only the start for IMSA’S new engineers
Bathurst 1000 victory is the biggest accolade an Australian Supercars engineer can have on their CV. For many, it’s a career-defining moment, the culmination of years of striving to reach the top of the nation’s most famous series and conquer its most prestigious race, all the while growing their understanding of what makes a car and driver tick.
So where do you go once you’ve scaled the heights of Mount Panorama? For John ‘Irish’ Mcgregor, who last year engineered Triple Eight veterans Craig Lowndes and Steven Richards to their seventh and fifth Bathurst victories respectively, and Dr Geoff Slater, the chief engineer at Tekno Autosports when Will Davison and Jonathon Webb earned the spoils in 2016, the answer to that question was identical.
Both have broadened their horizons and taken on the challenge of the IMSA Sportscar Championship’s tightly contested GTLM class, which makes up for what it lacks in car count with factory entries from Ford, Corvette,
Porsche and BMW. Mcgregor didn’t take long to make an impression, engineering the championship-leading #912 Porsche 911 RSR of Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor to back-to-back wins at Long Beach and Mid-ohio, while Slater runs the #24 BMW Team RLL M6 of Jesse Krohn and John Edwards that finished fourth at Sebring.
Slater, who has a PHD in mechanical engineering from his home-town university of Wollongong, New South
Wales after completing a thesis on welding fume dispersion, actually has two Bathurst wins on his CV. Earlier in 2016, he had engineered Tekno’s Mclaren 650s GT3 in which Shane van Gisbergen, Alvaro Parente and Webb dominated the Bathurst 12 Hour, giving him a unique double that went some way to making up for losing out on victory in the 1000 to a starter-motor failure 11 laps from home in 2014.
“I don’t think words can sum it up,” he says of the 2016 double. “It was very stressful, I still lie awake at night wondering how we did it.”
Despite the potential doors in academia that a doctorate could open, Slater’s passion for the sport meant that was not an option and has been a driving force throughout his career. Swapping several different hats, he engineered van Gisbergen’s single-car Tekno entry to five wins and second overall in 2014, a preciously rare feat in Supercars.
“I always wanted to be a driver, but the next best thing is telling a driver what to do, so I took up engineering,” he says.
But Slater’s academic prowess didn’t guarantee that people would listen to him, and it wasn’t until he gained handson experience as one of two engineers working with 1998 Bathurst enduro winner Jason Bright at the start-up Britek team that he won the respect of his peers.
“It’s strange – in motorsport you need both the academic side and the
experience,” he says. “The experience counts a lot more than what you’ve learned from a textbook, but having both is great. If you’ve got the experience and the knowledge, people will listen to you more. Just having the knowledge, you have to prove yourself – motorsport still has a very old-school mentality. “I started as a data engineer so I immersed myself in that, then did the race engineering, built the dampers and learned everything, which gave me the experience I could take on. With Jason, a textbook would say one thing but the driver would say what it actually meant, so it was good to learn from him what the changes affected.”
Northern Irishman Mcgregor had a similar experience after succeeding Jeromy Moore – now a Porsche development engineer – and being promoted from Lowndes’ data engineer to race engineer in 2017.
Having made his start on two wheels with Nutt Racing in British Supersport, before relocating to Sydney to engineer for Australian GT squad Simply Sports Cars – “a very small garage-run set-up, we took everything in the back of a Transit van” – Mcgregor found Roland Dane’s multiple championship-winning team a considerable step up in professionalism.
The 31-year-old admits that 2017, in which Lowndes finished outside the top four for the first time since 2004 and didn’t win a race, was “much harder than I anticipated” as he learned to cope with management responsibilities, but is now much more confident for the experience.
“It’s OK when everything is going smoothly, but when it’s not you’ve got a tyre man and three mechanics and a team manager and a boss like Roland Dane all looking at you,” says Mcgregor. “When I first talked to Roland about taking on Craig, he said, ‘Look, he’s so well known that you’ll either do really badly and never get a job again, or you’ll do OK and things will open up for you’. He was quite frank about it!
“Craig in his last couple of years and me in my first couple of years, it couldn’t have gone better. The two of us got along like a house on fire and he was very respectful. If I ever made a mistake, we made a mistake together and the same with him. It worked well, and from there you gain the respect of other people.
“If I ever made a mistake, we made a mistake together and the same with him”