Double Duty In S5000

Garry Rogers is about to inject a double dose of excitement into S5000 open-wheeler action.

The veteran team owner is close to completing a two-seater S5000 and plans to have it on the track before the end of the year.

He has copied the efforts of Minardi, and McLaren in Formula One and the two-seater IndyCar that claims to be the world’s fastest taxi with Mario Andretti at the wheel in the USA.

The Rogers’ car has been salvaged and extended from one of the cars that was constructed at the start of the S5000 comeback plan in Australia.

Unlike the single-seaters which now compete for the Gold Star, which use a carbon-fibre tub chassis, it has a tube-frame construction that has allowed a relatively easy transformation into a two-seater.

“I built it so I can have a ride. Although I’m probably going to drive it myself as well,” the 70-something Rogers told Race News.

“When Covid started we got stuck into some of the projects that were lying around the workshop in Melbourne. The ute that we built out of a Supercar and some other stuff including the Monaro for the 24-hour at Bathurst.

“I’d had this idea for a while. We were busy with other things but in the next couple of months we’ll get stuck into this and get it ready.”

Rogers said the two-seater had been a relatively easy conversion job because of the layout of the first car built by GRM.

“We’ll just lengthen the chassis. It’s the original experiment car that we built and it has a space-frame.”

There are several other projects in build at GRM, as well as a potential program to build extra S5000 race cars for the Australian Grand Prix if the race goes ahead, as well as the day-to-day race preparation for the team’s cars in the SuperCheap Auto TCR Australia Series and the S5000 championship.

“It’s moving along. Looking good. So long as we don’t have any major repairs from crash damage in TCR we’ll get it done pretty quickly,” Rogers said.