GM the waking giant
By Andrew Clarke
Date posted: 19 March 2025
Triple Eight’s defection to Ford appears to have woken a sleeping giant in Supercars in GM and the brand’s global motorsport boss Eric Warren was at Albert Park.
It is not quite a “Don’t poke the bear” moment in Australian motorsport, but it is close. And the recruitment of Triple Eight back in the Ford fold, seems to have awoken the Chevrolet bear is the arrival of its global motorsport boss, Eric Warren, on our shores for the first time is any indication.
For Warren, it was about sitting back and taking stock. Where does Australia sit in GM’s global motorsport program?
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW IN THE LATEST ISSUE OF AUTO ACTION HERE
And yes, he was in Melbourne partly for the Australian Grand Prix, and next year he will be here for the birth of Cadillac F1, but he was also getting his head around Supercars, playing an arm around his teams and sussing out the landscape.
It would be fair to say that GM isn’t taking Australia for granted anymore. It has woken, and it is serious.
“I wanting to come and meet a lot of the Supercars teams,” he told Auto Action. “Any time you have an opportunity and a big change; you want to take a look and say, “How do I raise the bar?” And then, as we’ve grown GM motorsports globally with Chevrolet, a lot of the different technologies that we employ across our series really find an opportunity to reset, and so it’s been great.
“We spent a lot of time all week and all weekend getting to meet all the teams and we’ve got a good plan, I think, going forward.
“I think what’s been exciting is we’ve had great performance over the last years, and the visibility of it has been awesome, and then with Shane van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin going over to the USA and having great success in other series, we see it not only as just for the region but also for talent, and it expands our portfolio, and the cars – the Gen3 cars – got a lot closer to the next-gen car in NASCAR.
“So, I think there’s a lot of opportunity, and hopefully, we’ll move some talent and try some different things coming in both directions.”
Which all means he see Supercars as both a standalone opportunity and as part of a global platform. The latter is not something we hear much about from his key rivals at Ford, but it may be a silent agenda item.
“General Motors, obviously we race globally, and we want to build our Australian position, reintroducing Cadillac into Australia, and so hopefully we’ll expand a lot of our customer affinity to the brand. It’s really how we use motorsports to build that and drive some of our increased sales.
“I think we ought to be smart. I think it’s the economics working with the series and trying to figure out, trying to find a balance with the teams,” he says referring to the more boutique rather than mass volume nature of the GM and Chevrolet business in Australia.
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