Sausage sizzles spark SA driver Todd Hazelwood to Bathurst 1000 debut
TODD Hazelwood is driven to succeed. The young SA driver is making his debut at Australia’s most iconic race, the Bathurst 1000, after a decade of flipping sausages to raise the cash to put a car on the track.
TODD Hazelwood is standing in line at the Bathurst Mitre 10 checkout, buying a new fuse for his team trailer.
“Ahh, yeah, not sure Craig Lowndes would be the man for the job if that happened at Triple Eight,” the Bathurst 1000 rookie grins.
But this is the Hazelwood way. All hands on deck. Sleeves up, get it done.
This is a bloke who, alongside mum Sharon, dad Russell and sister Loren, has flipped 500 sausages most weekends for the best part of the past decade, trying to raise the cash to put a car on the racetrack.
So even now, as the clock ticks towards the South Australian’s debut in the Great Race at Mount Panorama this morning, if there’s a busted fuse needing replacement then it might as well be the man behind the wheel making the run to the shops.
“It’s been a pretty incredible journey so far,” Hazelwood says. “And a lot of hard work. You can’t really explain to someone what we’ve been through as a family to get to the point we are today.
“Financially, we had to remortgage the house to get our first shot in Supercars. It was a big risk.
“People see the glory side of what we do on the racetrack. That’s fine, but finding hundreds of thousands of dollars to go racing – you’re fundraising every weekend, selling snags to put a race car on the grid.
“I don’t feel like I’ve done everything the hard way but we’ve worked day and night to achieve what we have, and I’m very proud of how far we’ve come.
“There’s still a lot of unmarked territory but we’re on the right track to get to where we want to go.”
Hazelwood, 22, today becomes the latest South Australian driver to make his debut at Australia’s most iconic motor race, the Bathurst 1000.
The lad from Athelstone joins fellow Adelaide boys Tim Slade, Scott Pye, 2011 Bathurst champion Nick Percat and veteran part-timer Dean Canto among the field of 52 drivers, and is one of four rookies set to be initiated in the almost seven-hour endurance event at Mount Panorama.
Hazelwood is one of the leading drivers in Supercars’ second-tier Super2 Dunlop Series but has been called up to co-drive with Brad Jones Racing’s Tim Blanchard in the No. 21 Commodore in the nation’s favourite car race. The car is the new version of the one that made headlines across the country last month, when it was obliterated in a horror smash at Victoria’s Sandown circuit.
HAZELWOOD was behind the wheel, in his co-driving debut with Blanchard, when he was nudged on a high-speed corner and sent spearing into a tyre wall at 260km/h.
The $500,000 car was destroyed but Hazelwood walked from the incident unhurt. He was cleared by medicos and, incredibly, returned to the track to race in his own car barely 40 minutes later.
“That was pretty tough. It was a pretty spectacular sort of incident,” he says.
“The hard part was once I got back out there, because the corner where the incident happened is the fastest part of the track and you need big commitment anyway.
“There was mud all around the side of the track where it had all been dug up.
“Every lap you’d try to look away but just in your peripheral vision you could see it. That was a weird feeling.
“I was devastated for the team and Tim Blanchard because they took a leap of faith to take me on.
“I was so worried about what they were going to think but they were fully understanding that there was nothing I could do. I was just an innocent bystander.
“Unfortunately, that’s how racing goes sometimes. It’s a matter of how many punches you can take and then how you get up and go again.”
Hazelwood cut his first lap of a racetrack as a six-week-old infant and, according to family lore, his destiny was set.
Russell, a shift manager with Pacific National at Dulwich, moved off the land near Parilla, in the Mallee, to Adelaide with his work with the railways before Todd was born.
A former motorcycle desert racer, Russell suffered a back fracture in a bike crash when a drunk driver cut him off on the way home from work.
“So that wasn’t great because mum was pregnant with me in the hospital and there’s dad lying next to her with a broken back,” Hazelwood says.
“Fortunately, it all worked out OK and he had a complete recovery but after that there was a ban on motorbike riding in the Hazelwood household.”
Russell switched to four wheels and an allegiance to the Ford brand and Todd followed suit.
“I was born in 1995, the same year as the last Grand Prix in Adelaide, and dad got to do a parade lap in the old Falcon he was competing in.
“So my first ever lap around a racetrack was around the Grand Prix circuit. I was six weeks old and mum and dad say ‘Todd never had any hope of doing anything other than being a race car driver’.
“It’s funny how these things work out.”
Introduced to go-karts at five, Hazelwood began competing on dirt circuits at seven. By eight, he had shown so much promise he was allowed to move up to a juniors class, driving against rivals as old as 14.
As a kid, he idolised anyone aligned to Ford’s blue oval – from Craig Lowndes during his run with the manufacturer between 2001 and 2009, to two-time champion Marcos Ambrose and 2010 series winner James Courtney.
Moves through bitumen karting, Formula Ford and Formula 3 preceded Hazelwood’s rise to the Supercars’ Dunlop Series with Matt Stone Racing in 2014, then aged just 18, where he won the category’s rookie of the year award.
BUT, as is the moneypit nature of motorsport, nothing came easily – or cheaply.
“That year of Formula 3 and going into the first year of Supercars was really tough,” Hazelwood says.
“We’d just lost our major sponsor and sat down together and wondered how the hell we were going to keep racing.
“We were talking about having a year off to try to find money and get new sponsors but, unfortunately with this sport, it’s such a savage industry that the moment you’re off the radar for a year you’re almost forgotten about.
“We took the punt and worked as hard as we could to make sure it worked.”
So from a hopeful youngster helping dad tinker with cars and traditions of Bathurst family barbecues, Hazelwood today gets his chance to live out a motorsport dream 20 years in the making.
“I can’t wait. Arriving here this week, I was like a kid in a candy store,” he says.
“Every time you come to Bathurst you drive in and the first thing you see is the mountain with the lettering of ‘Mount Panorama’.
“It’s the only place I’ve ever gone where it sends shivers up your spine every time you arrive. It’s pretty incredible.
“This is my first time being in the 1000 and it’s definitely a dream come true.
“I get nervous just watching the race, let alone actually being a part of it.
“It’s going to be a very cool weekend.”