Pony Up!

After seven seasons with the Nissan Altima, Kelly Racing switches to Ford Mustangs and downsizes to two cars in 2020. Co-owner and driver Rick Kelly reflects on the team’s time with Nissan and what awaits with Ford.

- Andrew Clarke

The news in early-2012 was exactly what Supercars needed. The Car of the Future program had ticked one of the boxes it needed to tick with a new manufacturer joining the category, Nissan with Kelly Racing.

As the pioneers in this exercise, Todd and Rick Kelly had taken on a massive venture and a giant step into the unknown from which others would benefit, namely Erebus Motorsport with AMG Mercedes- Benz and Garry Rogers Motorsport with Volvo.

There was talk of how much money Nissan had dropped just to get the engine close to that of the established rivals, and there was complexity getting aero parity right. The Altima had to conform to all the measurements. Its steeply raked front windscreen and tailgate meant it was slippery and a very different beast to the Commodore and Falcon of the time. It was a challenge, and now it is ending after seven years.

The Kellys made a team that builds and develops, and only one manufacturer remaining was going to allow that to happen, while acknowledging that the seven-year-old build and development program for the Nissan has clearly left it trailing behind two Holden evolutions and one significant evolution from Ford in the switch from Falcon to Mustang.

“For us, it’s just really exciting,” Rick Kelly says from his Braeside base.

“Obviously, we’ve been in the Nissan program for a long time and the cars that are racing in Supercars now are quite different in the specification to what we started with. The Nissan that we’ve got and that we race was built to the rules of the times.

“So having a common car and all the bits and pieces that go along with it is going to be different and a new challenge for us. To get into something that’s I guess a little bit more current than what we’re in now is something we are really looking forward to.”