It is an obsession that has driven the lives of the two taciturn Kiwis to the point where they dominate the toughest touring car championship in the world.

How else can you describe the 2003 form of this team, which as we close in on the blue ribbon Sandown and Bathurst championship rounds had scored five consecutive wins courtesy of star driver Marcos Ambrose and new signing Russell Ingall?

Drop down to Konica and there are the Stones again, kicking butt with Mark Winterbottom.

In the process the Stones have eclipsed V8's benchmark, the Holden Racing Team and Mark Skaife. That's a feat until very recently rated well nigh on impossible.

How can this be so? Talk to Ross and Jimmy and the reasons seem straightforward: dedication, hard work and a lot of smart people all pushing in the same direction.

But that's HRT's modus operandi as well, so it goes deeper into their psyches than that. Perhaps the best person to explain it is Jimmy Stone himself. A much-travelled racing mechanic now well into is 50s, who has worked in F1, F3, Can-Am and since the late 1980s, Australian touring car racing.

Jimmy is the quieter of the racing brothers - which is saying something. Taller, thinner, more wizened. Utterly, utterly, utterly focused on his job as the engineering chief of Stone Brothers Racing.

He is telling this story against himself, but it actually works the other way. Unless you're his wife Bev, that is.

"I'm not a good holiday person because I don't relax," he says. "My wife makes me relax, she turns my phone off. But I don't relax.

"I do my best drawings and ideas quite often when I am on holidays. I came home from holidays once when I was way up in the Whitsundays with more pages of drawings ..."

"I enjoy the competitive part of racing. I think if I stopped doing it I would just keel over and die. I just love the challenge. The next challenge is always around the corner."

Neither brother - there are two more brothers and a sister back in New Zealand, by the way - can explain where this burning competitive desire comes from. Their parents had no particular interest in cars or motorsport. They grew up in the Pukekohe area near Auckland, but that had no relevance, says Ross.

"Jimmy always had it in his blood," he recalls. "I can remember when we were young he was always pulling things apart and putting them back together again. At one stage he was going to build an airplane that we were all going to go flying on when he was still at school. So it's just a natural thing."

Ross Stone is the cherubic, pleasant face of SBR. The one that talks into the TV at the V8 races, he's mild mannered, more sociable than big brother.

But, like in Jimmy, there's a hardness underneath, it's just less visible to the public eye. He revealed it, momentarily, when he put Mark Skaife in his place on V8 Superstars earlier this year.

"Sorry for talking while you are interrupting Skaifey," he fired as Skaife cut across him one too many times. Retreat one red-faced touring car champ. 

"He deserved that," Ross remarks, unrepentant.

Ross is cunning as well as tough. An expert lobbyist and political operator, he has run a campaign this year partly through the press to boost his team's financial deal with Ford. At the same time - funnily enough - rumours emerged about a possible switch to Mitsubishi. That gambit seems to have paid off, with a more lucrative five-year deal signed late winter with the blue oval. 

Less successful has been a bid for a BA parity adjustment, which again emerged as an issue in the press, but originated from SBR. TEGA knocked that idea back straight away.

But the opportunity to exercise his political muscle has increased with his appointment to the TEGA board to fill the casual vacancy created by Bob Forbes' resignation.Ross' racing past is less cosmopolitan than Jimmy's, more focused on Australia and New Zealand. He built and raced his own openwheelers for a while, then pitched that in for the other side of pitwall and the Tasman, dragging his brother with him.

A series of touring car gigs in Australia included Andrew Miedecke's Sierra days, DJR's halcyon 1994-95 period and Alan Jones' ill-starred Pack Leader Racing, where significantly, the Stones levered open the door top team ownership.

They bought AJ out in 1997, they ran Jason Bright in a single Pirtek-sponsored EL Falcon in 1998, with Steven Richards joining them to win Bathurst. There were just six employees in the team.

Now, there are 32 full-time with another four part-timers and Stone Brothers Racing swallows up two large warehouses next to each other on the northern edge of the Gold Coast. 

Ross has long since laid down the tools to run the whole show, managing the business he owns 50:50 with his brother. The incomings, the outgoings, the paper trail, the politicking, the sponsor chasing, the endless negotiations.

Keeping it together You would expect Marcos Ambrose and Russell Ingall to declare SBR as the best race team going. Every race driver does at every team, until you switch the tape recorder off ... then the story often changes. But not in the case of these two. Push and probe them in different ways and they just keep talking the people and the place up. The closest Ambrose comes to a negative is recounting one of his earliest meetings with Jimmy Stone after he signed on for the team in 2001. It's not that bad, he is laughing as he recounts it. "One of the best moments - although it seemed bad at the time - I had was with Jimmy, when I was brand new to the team and I walked into the workshop to say g'day to the guys. "He came running over said 'how are you Marcos' and I said 'really good Jimmy thank you', then I said something like 'gee the weather's cold' or something like that and he turned around and was gone. "He wasn't interested in that. He wanted to know stuff that was about racing, he didn't want to know about shit." That story leads Ambrose to a broader point. "Bullshitters don't last and people who don't deliver don't last in the team. You have to really know what you are doing, you have to be on the ball, otherwise you get spotted very easily and then you are moved on." Sounds harsh, but Ambrose is also quick to point out that he has never been as well supported emotionally or psychologically since he began racing. "We have been through some difficult eras like sticking the car in the gravel at Bathurst in the first year. That was a bad moment for me. And there are other drivers who have had a tougher time than I have and they've stuck by them too." That sort of stuff seems eons ago, but despite the glories of 2003 Ambrose hasn't forgotten. "We have worked at it together, and it has not been me and them," he says. "We have worked at it as a group. We have solved a lot of the problems they were having with drivers and car setups and things like that. "I was able top solve a lot of the problems I had with my own driving style and car problems and how to understand the car setups. You just forget how far we have come. "I have cleaned up 10-fold since I have been in these cars. They have been fantastic teachers for me and I have been open enough to listen to them and heed their advice. And vice-versa, they have listened to what I have had to say and I have been able to give them the platform to see the potential of their car and their team. "And the difference between what we are doing now compared to what we were doing three years ago is huge, we are so much more in control of the situation - it is a credit to everybody." Ingall, with his extensive European experience and years with Perkins Engineering, looks at SBR with the worldly perspective of a veteran. After all, it's worth remembering Ambrose hadn't driven a V8 until he joined the Stones. "You've got to have professionals in each department of the car and I think that's what SBR has," he remarks. "They probably have the best people in the field in each of those departments and that's when you stop having mechanical failures and reliability problems. "When someone specialises in that one thing on that one car and does it right and he is the best at doing that job, then naturally you pick up on development and reliability."

It's a challenge that has escalated rapidly since the start of 2002, when the team had just 15 employees. But now, with the in-house capability to do virtually everything needed to build a V8 Supercar, SBR is the most self-sufficient team in pitlane.

"You have control of not only the timing of an item but also the quality of items," explains Ross. "Sometimes in this business you can be going down a certain path and then there is a rule change or a specific need for something - you need to be quick on your feet and change direction.

"All we have ever tried to do is run the business for it to move up pitlane and up the grid. That's what it has all been about," he adds. "And as I have generated more income we have been able to do jobs better and bring somebody in and do it all in-house."

The influx of staff triggered a restructure for this year. Reel off the names at the top of the chain and it emphasises the strength-in-depth the team now has.

Ross sits at the top of the structure as overall administrator. Jimmy is in charge of engineering - fundamentally that means development and construction. Foundation team member Campbell Little has been moved up to technical manager, which places him in charge of the racing of the cars. Business manager Mark Roworth isn't so well known by the fans, but has played a key role in the development of SBR's cash-flow and revenue sources.

Drill down another level and you find crew chief and pit crew manager Les Laidlaw - the same Les Laidlaw who was team manager at DJR and CAT Racing, and Ken Douglas, the former production car racer who chucked in a job at Ford in Melbourne to join SBR as an electronics and computing guru.

It's not rigidly ordered though. Little and one Stone or other have worked together on and off since the late 1980s and Campbell was the first person the brothers rang when Pack Leader was being pulled together at a frantic pace. He is their key employee.

The Lowndes connection Craig Lowndes can claim some of the credit for the growth and evolution of SBR from small, engineering-oriented race team to a slick 21st century operation, where marketing and PR go hand-in-hand with the racing. Ross Stone wooed Lowndes hard to make the shift from HRT to Ford in 2000, but in the end the multiple touring car champ was snaffled - along with the Ford money - by Fred Gibson. That miss left a lasting impression on the Stones. "When we lucked out on that we thought 'okay, our engineering is all right but what else are we missing out on?'," recalls Ross. "So that's when we decided to try and work and build SBR as a brand and an image. Because up to that point we honestly hadn't worried about that." He recalls the unexpected Bathurst win in 1998 as an example of the old SBR. "The newspaper guys came around and we'd say basically 'f--- off and leave us alone so we can pack up and get ready for the next race'. "But you've got to remember where the V8 Supercar business was in those days compared to where it is today. It's just getting broader and broader all the time."

A former motorcycle racer and mechanic, Little - a silly name considering how tall he is - came to the Stones as an engine builder and has constantly increased his skills and abilities in all sorts of areas. He is Jimmy's muse, translating his ideas and drawings onto the CAE screen, discussing, arguing, modifying all the while.

It is a sympatico relationship, nurtured from the days in the late 1980s when they worked for Frank Gardner and Tony Longhurst at B&H BMW.

"We each bounce stuff off one another and when we sit down and talk we always make progress," says Jimmy. "It doesn't matter if it's early in the morning, or late at night or on the telephone.

"He's exactly the same as me, I'll ring him at 10 at night and he'll be on his computer and he'll put it on the screen. The basis of the engineering is Campbell and me. Everything I do and everything he does we bounce off each other."

But everyone the Stones hires contributes, he adds. All ideas are given due consideration, tried or rejected on the basis of their value, not who put them up.

Douglas brought organisational nous and commonsense to the engineering side of the business; Laidlaw has been a key to turning around SBR's inconsistent pit stops until they are now state-of-the-art.  

"There are still teams out there with a dominating person but you just can't do it all," Stone says. "I have always had the advantage of listening to everybody, I listen to their argument and go 'yep, but I think we should do this' and I usually have a reason because I have been racing so long."

Ross and Jimmy bring on only staff who have raced in some form or other and therefore understand the challenges, constraints and sheer hard work of it. It pays off in all sorts of ways. Roworth, for example, raced Karts and was the first to bring Mark Winterbottom to their attention.

"We have always hired guys who are racers," explains Jimmy Stone. "We encourage our guys to ride motorbikes, ride jet-skis, go white water rafting, that's the type of blokes that we are. 

"We are not dare-devils because we want everyone to be aware of the risks, but whether we all ride bikes or all go out jet-skiing, we have a ball together.

"So that's how we have built such a competitive team, out of guys who themselves are so competitive."

It's all added up this year to a dynamite combination, bringing SBR to the front of the pack. And having climbed to the peak, the Stones are determined that there will be no trough. No distractions, no slackening, the target remains the same.

"We want to stay at the top of the pile or near the top, that's for sure," says Jimmy. "We certainly want to hire the best drivers every year when they are available, the best engine guys and ultimately the best sponsorship package.

"Our motto is yesterday is tomorrow's history. Once we win a race we forget about it, let's just worry about the next one."

Doing it their way Want to understand the technical essence of Stone Brothers Racing? Try the development of the BA Falcon V8 Supercar as a starting point . Ford Australia's motorsport division spent 18 months and untold dollars on developing the Project Blueprint BA, including the shell and rollcage designs so crucial to the car's strength, safety and performance. It imported an engineer from Jaguar's technical centre at Whitley in the UK specifically for the project and tapped into FoMoCo's massive international computing power to make sure crucial stuff like the finite element analysis numbers added up. The Ford boys were determined that the first racecar to be developed in-house at Broadmeadows since the legendary GTHO would be a good one. So what happened when Jimmy Stone and his engineering team took a look at Ford's pride and joy? They redesigned it. They believed - no, they knew - they could do it better. "It's one thing to design something on a Cray super-computer but we didn't agree with the numbers Ford came out with at the end of it," says SBR's technical manager Campbell Little. "They had a car that was stiff one way and not another way." Using a computer aided design software package, Little and Jimmy Stone did their own finite element analysis calculations and came up with their own rollcage design, based on their experience developing the AU XR8. "First Jimmy drew it up on paper and then we started work on the computer. Jimmy would sit here beside me and say 'I think we should have a tube here and a tube there'. "And then for our own benefit, to back up what we saw in our computer, we made a quarter scale model of the rollcage. We twisted it and then took the tubes out, and we twisted it again and then said 'that matches that'." The result was the most individually designed BAs in the V8 Supercar paddock, the farthest removed of any of the new generation racecars from Ford's original concept. But to take the theory to reality was a huge effort for the team, working flat-out through last summer, with each car taking 1200 man-hours to build up from a loosely bolted shell. But, as Little recounts, the build is only part of the job. The development simply never stops. "We have gone to the trouble of conducting inertia tests on the whole car," he reveals. "We have made a bracket and hung the car from the roof and swung it so you can calculate the inertia by how far it swings and how long it swings for. "We have turned it on its side in the air with a driver weighting and fuel weighting and swung it back and forth to do the inertia tests, so we would know if we got rid of that weight what gain would we get from it. "We've done compliance tests where we put strain gauges between the uprights and jacked them apart to see how much they bent when we put X amount of load on them and how much they bent when we pulled them together. "We've put solid dampers in the car and bolted the chassis to the ground and jacked up one corner to see how much the chassis bends. "And that's why we changed the rollcage. It wasn't because we just thought about it, we did the tests. "The reason we are here isn't because it takes us that long to build and prepare our racecars, but because we are trying to make a better thing. I don't know how much difference in time it would make, but if it makes a one hundredth of a second per lap then it's worth doing."

Share this Article: 

Digg this story

Seed Newsvine

Post to Reddit

Save on del.icio.us

Email