Klimenko: Supercars ripped the best garage from her ‘hillbilly’ team

Betty Klimenko burst onto the Supercars scene a decade ago when she bought Stone Brothers Racing and switched it to running a pair of E-Class Mercedes-Benz. She says the sport today is very different to when she arrived, but some of it is still the same.

Not only was she a woman, but she was a unique woman. Short and tattooed, she cut a swathe through a fraternity that was more like a paternity, and many didn’t like or understand it.

Many didn’t see or care about her intelligence or marketability, and they tried to cut her down.

The narrative around her wealth hasn’t changed since the day she started in the sport, and that belies her passion for the sport and her broader family, her team.

“They always start off with the fact that I’m wealthy,” she says of many in the media. “There used to be a journalist, the first thing in every single one of his articles that he would say, billionaire blah blah.

“Who cares? It’s not about me; it should be about the team and their successes and everything else. But they seem to focus on me and the what’s around me in my life, in my world outside of motorsport and that to me is just wrong, I don’t want to be the focus. That’s my private life, that’s my other side of my world. You don’t see articles about Charlie with his forklifts. No one talks about that, so why should they talk about me?

“I’m a little bit intimidating because I grew up having to be a little bit intimidating when you’re the daughter of a very wealthy man who has one of the biggest companies in Australia. You’ve got to be intimidating because otherwise, you get lost in the backwash, and you have to stand out, especially in the 70s and 80s when women were still getting married, staying at home, and having children.

“It wasn’t what the world is now. To work in a male-orientated world back then was a hundred times harder than it is now, and you needed to take a lot of the stuff on the chin. I did my apprenticeship in old-world business, so what’s happening now hurts me and everything else, but I can let it go as well.

“I get angry, but don’t get upset about these things.”

As for Supercars, even a little more than a decade into her journey, she says the boys’ club still struggles with her and what she calls her little team, a non-factory-backed team that swept all before it last year. She believes Supercars wasn’t ready for that success.

“It wasn’t so much the people; I think it was more the organisation. I honestly feel Supercars wasn’t ready for a non-factory-backed team to win.”

What upset her more than not becoming the figurehead team for the sport was the introduction of the live pitlane order this year and the fact that her team would be the first championship-winning team not to be guaranteed the best garage in pitlane for the entire season.

“I was gobsmacked that they were going to start the live pit lane the one year a privateer wins. I said to Shane Howard, ‘You’re taking the only prize in the whole of Supercars, the only thing that we can aim for because there is no money’.

“Everyone thinks we get money for winning. There’s no money. There’s nothing but this one thing where you can sit in that garage for a whole year.

“I said, ‘You’ve ripped it out from under of our feet, you could have started it at the beginning of 2025 and given us all a year to get used to this idea. But you didn’t.’

“All year, while we’re fighting to win this championship, the goal was, ‘yes, we’re going to get that top garage, we’re going to get that top garage’. We got the top garage and it was ripped out from underneath us.

“I don’t think they knew how to handle Erebus being at the top. Because we are privateers… we’re more like the hillbilly privateer team. I wouldn’t say that, but we’ve never hidden that.

“It doesn’t matter if we’re starting the fight from the bottom of the pack or the top of the pack; it’s just the way we are. It’s how it’s always been, and Supercars didn’t understand that. I don’t think they understand their fans properly because their fans are not brought in by who is backed by a factory-backed team.

“They just want the best team to win. In that year, we were the best team. Everyone else had the same chance to get used to the cars as we did. Everyone had the same chance to put a car together as we did.

“So, you can’t say that we cheated. There was no cheating involved. But unfortunately, this is not the sport I signed up for.”

For the full story in Betty’s own words, see the digital edition Auto Action #1889

Photo by Mark Horsburgh / LAT Images