V8 Supercars team owner Todd Kelly says his Kelly Racing outfit is on track with its switch to Nissan from next season.
The team received its first shipment of parts from the Japanese manufacturer this week with more than 20 pallets of freight arriving at the team’s Melbourne base.
And 2005 Bathurst 1000 winner Todd, who runs the team with brother Rick, said the scope of making sure everything is in place for the 2013 season is huge.
While the pair are making sure their current Holden operation remains competitive in the 2012 campaign, a brigade of staff is poring over every element of preparing the team’s four-car Nissan fleet for next year.
“The reality of it, when it sinks in, forces everybody to be very ‘awake’ with the whole thing,” Kelly said.
“We’ve got one chance to get this project done and there is no choice. If we miss deadline, we don’t go car racing so it’s a pretty serious thing.
“At the moment, we are pretty much on track to what we would have hoped to achieve, which is good because normally when you have a design program of this magnitude, it normally runs over by quite a bit once you actually get into it.”
Kelly said the arrival of actual physical parts had been an exciting one for the team after months staring at computer-aided designs for the team’s 2013 Altima cars.
“When you are so involved in every aspect of the design, then you actually get the parts to arrive in a massive air freight crate, it’s a bit like kids in a candy shop,” he said.
“One of the first things we did was to get the whole sheet metal side of the Altima and race down to the fabrication area and literally stick it to the side of the chassis.
“That was the first time we went ‘wow this is how it will look in real life’. That was pretty cool.”