Driver Tom Clarke spectacularly rolled during a pre-season media day, leaving the team with a mad rush to be ready for the Toyota Gazoo Racing Australia Rally of Canberra on March 21-23.
The short turnaround to have the Fiesta repaired for the rally meant there wasn’t enough time to sticker the car.
Instead, the team has elected to let fans design the car a day before the event gets underway in earnest on Saturday.
The car will be on display at the pre-event Rally Show at Bunda Street and Scotts Crossing from 5pm where fans will be able to take to it with paint pens.
“We’re gonna let the fans draw all over it tonight, so we’ll use that as the livery for the weekend,” Clarke told Speedcafe.
“We’re going to let whoever – all the kids, the fans, or anyone that’s an artist to come down and draw whatever they want, as long as it’s not cock and balls, and we’ll let it fly.
“If someone draws some cool stuff on there and if it looks cool, we may even then take a photo of it and we could actually do another one where we could wrap it from what the fans drew on it properly or something like that, so that’d be cool.
“I reckon the kids are gonna love that. It’s not every day you get to draw on a car. As long as I don’t get any social media posts from parents saying you’ve started something now I’ve got home and they’ve drawn over my car.”
After rolling on Tuesday the week prior, Clarke said the car was fixed just shy of midday on Thursday.
The team drove to Canberra for the pre-event shakedown and was the last car on the stage to test.
Clarke was left with a nasty $50,000 repair bill from the accident, forced to ship parts from the UK.
“Look, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good, and it wasn’t cheap,” he laughed.
“That’s what it comes down to. Probably it was about 50 grand to properly put it back together, I suppose.
“There was a little bit in it because all the stuff in the front end of those are super expensive. It’s all carbon fibre, all those cross members and bits and pieces, they’re all specifically made and out of Chromoly.
“There were a lot of parts. We had to peel that A-pillar up on the driver’s side. That was where most of the damage was. We had to cut that off the car and put a new one on. We put a new door on, the back sides, that carbon fibre had to be repaired, and then we painted the whole car again.
“To turn it around that quick in any race car that needs that sort of work and especially waiting for parts to come in from another country is the hard part. I’ve got to give praise to my team because they put in huge hours to get it here for me today.”
After the mammoth effort to have the car ready, Clarke is just keen to get through the Rally of Canberra.
Although the event features just eight stages with four on each day, the event is something of a car killer and is notoriously hard on equipment.
“The main target is obviously to finish without it being too damaged,” he said.
“Realistically, we’re going to be aiming for podium, we want to be top three, but second off we’ll take a top five.
“There is probably seven guys there that can end up on the podium realistically. So getting a podium has been hard at the best of times in the last couple of years.”
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