Tickford confirms key personnel for 2022 season

TICKFORD RACING – 2022 TEAM STRUCTURE

23 February, 2022
Melbourne-based Tickford Racing has firmed up its team structure ahead of the 2022 Supercars Championship season, with internal promotions highlighting its main personnel changes ahead of the upcoming campaign. 2022 marks the 20^th season of competition for Tickford, which was founded as Ford Performance Racing in late 2002 and made its competitive debut at the 2003 Adelaide 500.
 
The team’s management structure remains unchanged in 2022, with CEO and Team Principal Tim Edwards entering his 18^th season with Tickford. Alongside Edwards, Team Manager Matthew Roberts enters his fourth season in the role, and is one of four staff members who have been part of the organisation since its inception, along with Darren Jones, David Paterson, and Ashley Campbell. Roberts will also continue his role on the pit crew as car controller on the Car 5/6 crew.
 
Tickford’s engineering department will continue to be overseen by Chief Engineer Nathaniel Osborne and Engineering Manager Brad Wischusen, with the former heading up development work from the team’s Campbellfield base and the latter looking after at-track operations of the engineering team. Powertrain development engineer Adam Mittek also continues in his role in 2022. 

Race engineers Sam Potter and Sam Scaffidi retain their roles in 2022, with Potter continuing with Cam Waters’ entry for a fourth season, while Scaffidi will engineer James Courtney’s No. 5 Ford Mustang in 2022. Promotion from within is a common theme in the garage occupied by Thomas Randle and Jake Kostecki’s entries in 2022, where Raymond Lau and Rhys Lenegan will step up to race engineer the team’s two young gun drivers in the new season.
 
The pairing of Randle and Lau carries over from 2021, where the two worked together in Randle’s three wild card appearances. Lau also spent 2020 and 2021 as race engineer of the team’s Super2 program, which included Zak Best’s run to second in the championship last season. After spending 2020 and 2021 as a data engineer for Tickford, Lenegan will partner 22-year old Kostecki, a fellow West Australian, for the youngster’s second full Supercars season and first with Tickford Racing. Data engineering roles will be filled by Blake Adamson, who joined the team mid-2021, and Bayden Charlton.
 
Long-time crew members Ben Milton and Simon Robinson will take on new roles with Tickford in 2022, where Milton, who spent the last three seasons as Chief Mechanic, will transition to the role of Workshop Manager following the retirement of Operations Manager Clive Sangster. With Milton moving to a primarily workshop-based role, Robinson will take on the position of Crew Chief, and will take up car controller duties for the 55/56 crew.

Edwards expressed his enthusiasm for the upcoming season, commending the work ethic and camaraderie amongst the Tickford Racing crew as reasons for his confidence for the 2022 Supercars season.
 
“We’re very happy with the team we have assembled for what is going to be a big 2022 season,” Edwards said. “Even in expanding back to four cars all of our management and key personnel are made up of familiar faces, which in a big team is always beneficial. We’ve also elevated a number of people internally and are looking forward to seeing those individuals take advantage of the opportunity.”
 
Edwards elaborated further on the changes within the team, which finished third in the Supercars Teams’ championship last season, led by Waters who won three races en route to fifth in the Drivers’ Championship.
 
“Two key changes internally were with Ben Milton moving into the Workshop Manager role after Clive Sangster retired at the end of 2021, and Simon Robinson effectively replacing Ben at the track as our Crew Chief. Both of them have been with the team for a very long time and they’ve done a great job for us over the years, so both of those decisions have been pretty popular in the team.”
 
“Looking at our engineering line up, we had long planned to bring Brad (Wischusen) off of a car so he can focus on the overall engineering program, and with four cars this year it made sense to make that move now and add Ray and Rhys as race engineers. They’ve both been with us for a while now, they know the team and our system, so it also made sense to pair them with our two younger drivers and round out what we think is a very strong team for the new season. We have some big goals for this year, and like everyone else we are looking forward to hitting the ground running at Sydney next week.”
 
Tickford Racing and the Supercars Championship kick off its 2022 season with the Sydney SuperNight, taking place March 4-6 at Sydney Motorsport Park.
 
Ends.