When it comes to tough season starts for Supercars drivers, few can top the first half of Garth Tander’s 2005 V8 Supercars Championship season.
The 2000 Bathurst 1000 winner had made the switch from Garry Rogers Motorsport in ’05 to replace Greg Murphy in the newly rebranded HSV Dealer Team during the off-season.
At the time, it seemed a dream move. Tander was seen by pundits as a future champion. When he made his Supercars debut with GRM in 1998, he was an instant threat, and winning Bathurst in 2000 with Jason Bargwanna justified the hype.
But GRM’s next three seasons were lacklustre, and when Tander came on the driver market, he was signed to drive alongside Rick Kelly as part of Holden’s ‘second’ factory team for 2005.
From the outside, it all made sense – a driver with untapped potential with a team that had just won the two consecutive Bathurst 1000s with Murphy and Rick Kelly.
However, when K-Mart’s primary support ended at the end of 2004 and with significant change unravelling with the ownership and structure of the four-car factory Holden effort, the opening rounds of the 2005 season were nothing short of disappointing.
Tander scored just four top 10s in the first five rounds – a far cry from the feats of that team’s recent results.
Hidden Valley’s midseason round provided a change of fortune where he won a race, and from there, momentum built. He finished third at Queensland Raceway, fourth in the Sandown 500 and a pair of fourths on the Gold Coast streets.
Enter Symmons Plains – the penultimate round of the 2005 Supercars Championship season – and few would have predicted Tander’s dominance.
After missing pole by the barest of margins to Steven Richards, Tander went on to complete a rare clean-sweep of all three races at the Tasmanian track, securing what was only his second career V8 Supercars round victory.
Of course, his only ’round’ win prior to that was the 2000 Bathurst 1000 …
But at Symmons Plains that weekend in 2005, Tander was untouchable.
Team-mate Kelly capped off a solid weekend by finishing third, fourth and second to be third for the round behind fellow Holden driver Richards for Perkins Engineering.
By that stage of the season, Tander’s championship hopes were gone, but as we look back on his Symmons Plains feat – now 20 years ago – Tander’s late-season success provided an insight into what was to come.
Rick Kelly won the 2006 title for the team, Tander then claimed the 2007 crown and in 2008 was drafted into the Holden Racing Team – arguably the most prized race seat of the era.
Tander has since gone on to win five Bathurst 1000s in total. Rare air.
And while that Symmons Plains domination of 2005 might have just seemed like ‘a good day at the races’ – it was the laying of foundations for a driver who will no doubt be a future Supercars Hall of Famer …