Debbie Thaiday and family design a supercar

When the Team 18 Racing supercar takes to the V8 track in Darwin this weekend, it will honour two brave women in a tribute laced with meaning and emotion.

While the opportunity to produce the artwork for a supercar is an incredible honour, for Debbie Thaiday it was about telling a family story.

When Team 18 racing hit the track this weekend, they will be doing so in a car which tells the story of Mackay’s GH United league team and commemorate the life of Gail Hine and Grace Hoffman who both died from a brain aneurysm in 2009.

Ms Thaiday said it has not yet sunk in.

“It’s pretty surreal but it will be just cool to see the family’s story on the car,” she said.

“We are going to get together as a GH family to watch on Saturday but Nulon is actually taking us up to Townsville so we will get to see it race in person which is pretty cool.”

Ms Thaiday said the whole process happened pretty quickly.

“They (Nulon) contacted me and I sent them some of the artwork that we’ve done and gave them a bit of an idea of what I was thinking and they liked it,” she said.

“The design idea just comes. It’s not just me, my family is involved as well and we sit down and bounce ideas off each other and then I draw it.”

Dt trait designz for Team 18 Racing to be used in Darwin and Townsville. Picture: Nulon Supercar.

Their “collaboration of ideas” created a design with the life of Ms Hine and Ms Hoffman the centrepiece.

“The turtle and the butterfly are the animals that represent Grace and Gail and they have from the beginning so we just did a new design for them,” Ms Thaiday said.

“For the turtle with Grace, I think one of her sons did a design for a turtle in the beginning and I think he had some frangipanis on her back and it was like she was carrying the family.

Dt trait designs for Team 18 Racing to be used in Darwin and Townsville. Picture: Nulon Supercar.

“The butterfly is for Gail because the day after she passed, she has four daughters and they were all sitting together and they said an incredible amount of butterflies surrounded them and they decided their mum was represented as a butterfly.”

The burgundy colour in the dots represents the colour of brain aneurysm awareness.

The design also features a totem for each women in the form of a Torres Strait Island pigeon and crocodile, as well as the black tip reef shark and crocodile that are Ms Thaiday’s totems.

She wanted to thank GH United for giving her and her family the opportunity to tell their story.