CAUCHI MAGIC
Below is an extract from an exclusive chat that Grove Racing Team Principal had with AUTO ACTION, in the chat he talks about the changes between the Ford team and Triple Eight and his controversial departure at the start of the year.
Everyone thought that David Cauchi was part of the furniture at Triple Eight Race Engineering.
And then he wasn’t …
After standing in race control in The Bulls garage as a long-term pillar of the team’s success, engineering Jamie Whincup to titles, Cauchi has flipped to the dark side at Grove Racing.
Cauchi tells AUTO ACTION it’s too early to be talking about the details of his red-to-blue defection, and the critical technical differences between a Holden Commodore and a Ford Mustang in Supercars racing, but is happy and open on just about every other topic.
“I’ve learned that life is weird and wonderful,” Cauchi says.
“I never say never these days. I knew I needed a different challenge in life.”
Cauchi is not the first high-profile defector from Roland Dane’s crack outfit, following such successful engineers as Ludo Lacroix, Adrian Burgess, Campbell Little and even Jeromy Moore – although he returned after time at Porsche in Europe – into something new.
He’s also graduated from a race engineer into a Team Principal, the best it gets for an ambitious front-line fighter in Supercars.
“Running a team was always something that interested me. And I knew that for an opportunity to arise I had to make the really, really hard decision to hand in a letter to Triple Eight that I wasn’t going to be there.”
So Cauchi is admitting he didn’t have a job when he left the crack Banyo camp? And that the Grove Racing deal came later?
“Yes. That’s right,” he begins. “I was ready for a change. I had to make the decision so I could go and look for another opportunity.
“If you don’t resign you get to the end of the year and then you have another six months before you can leave. You have to bite the bullet.
“I was just looking for something different. I had been at T8 for 14 years, which is a very long time, and I had had an amazing time. And was still having an amazing time.
“It’s a great bunch of people. Most of my best friends in life still work there. At end of the day, friends are the most important thing to me in life.”
So what is the big BUT that took him into the unknown?
“I was looking for a new challenge. I would still love to race engineer. But I also knew I needed a different challenge.”
So how did he end up in the driving seat at Grove Racing?
“That came out fairly organically. That just sort of came about. They were still finalising their take-over, transitioning to 100 per cent ownership. That eventually played out for them.
“Brenton had driven for T8 in Super2, so I had a relationship with Brenton already. We would keep in touch, in general, socially. We got talking … “
But then he had to tell Roland Dane, as T8 quickly launched a legal challenge over the details of Cauchi’s move to Grove. It’s now been settled, and it’s something else that Cauchi will not talk about.
But how did Dane, a notoriously tough boss in business, react?
Cauchi reveals how his former boss reacted in the latest edition of AA on sale in your latest newsagency of digitally in the link below.
For more of the latest motorsport news pick up the current issue of Auto Action.
