Australia is home to many sheds, garages and warehouses, but the one at RaceFuels holds an important key to Australian motorsport.
Stored at its world-class facility in Melbourne’s south-east is a range of fuel to supply a majority of Australia’s leading national categories, including the Repco Supercars Championship.
“This warehouse holds enough racing fuel to run Australian motorsport for four months,” RaceFuels’ Mark Tierney told The Garage.
“We turn over stock three times a year, we also make a lot of the fuel in this shed and store the imported products here too in an organised fashion.
“The RaceFuels headquarters keeps us organised enabling us to service Australian motorsport.”
Believed to be the only facility of its kind in the world, RaceFuels stores and produces a variety of fuels including the BP Ultimate E85 fuel, which powers the Repco Supercars Championship.
“We need a season’s worth of racing fuel in here as we can’t trust international freight,” Tierney continued.
“With race meetings in multiple states or sometimes countries on the same weekend, we need stock and we have everything we need all here.
“We need a facility certified to hold this amount of fuel, it needs to be clean, it needs to be concise because customers expect maximum performance and consistency for us.
“In a world of shrinking manufacturing, to perform our own level of production is very important to us.”
“This place allows us to react very quickly to any demand Australia-wide and feeds racing fuel to not only Australia, but New Zealand too.”
Not only does the facility store fuel, but the specialised equipment RaceFuels requires to complete its service, which it is starting to do ahead of the Repco Supercars Championship in Sydney in just over a week’s time.
A small team of four ensures fuel is supplied to multiple events in various states and in most cases on the same weekend.
However, the team also spends a lot of time preparing for events in its office, so too when COVID restrictions permit personal training sessions to increase team building.
Within the RaceFuels office, highlights of the types of events it has supplied fuel to include the Bathurst 12 Hour, Shannons Motorsport Australia Championships and the Repco Supercars Championship, including the hallmark Bathurst 1000 are displayed both on the walls.
A cabinet of Bathurst winners welcomes customers into the office from both the 1000 and 12 Hour.
“The pinnacle of Australasian motorsport is the Repco Supercars Championship and we’re very proud supporters of the series,” said Tierney. “It’s an honour to have the opportunity to supply BP E85 to all the teams involved.
“There’s great responsibility to provide the service matching the intensity of the competition on-track in the Repco Supercars Championship.”
A run of 10 events in seven weeks lies ahead for the RaceFuels team, but it is up for the challenge.
“It will be a challenging two months supplying more than 250,000 litres of fuel to 10 events spanning more than seven weeks in three separate states,” said General Manager Sean Scott.
“It’s actually quite exciting. We’ve become very agile and adaptive as a business over the past two years, so this run of events to finish off 2021 really gives us the chance to demonstrate those capabilities.
“Some of the turnarounds are tight, so it will be a test of our planning and procedures, though we do have some inbuilt redundancies if required.
“Getting enough fuel on site for each of the events is not the challenge, doing it efficiently with an eye to getting everything back home is.”