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Germany’s reaction to down under success
For more than a decade, Melbourne Performance Centre has represented Audi Sport down under with distinction.
A winner of multiple GT titles, MPC expanded into TCR when it arrived on the Australian landscape in 2019.
Sitting atop both the Fanatec GT World Challenge Australia Powered by AWS and Supercheap Auto TCR Australia standings, MPC’s success is not being ignored by Audi Sport in Germany, which rates the achievements down under highly.
In the midst of launching a new evolution of its RS 3 LMS TCR (of which MPC will receive an allocation) and an update of the highly successful R8 LMS GT3 Evo, Head of Audi Sport customer racing Chris Reinke detailed the relationship between Germany and its Australian operation.
“Australia is a very strong market,” Reinke said.
“With MPC, we see a very professional attitude and very self organised operation. Then there’s on the other side is our partner Audi Sport Customer Racing Australia, you can see the sheer volume of cars entered, which is a demonstration of trust the customers have in this operation.
“In Australia, we see the many titles that have been collected through GT World Challenge Australia and many more categories Audi have won in shows the quality that they are able to supply to the customer.”
Europe’s racing season began late bringing competition in Australia to forefront at Audi Sport. During this time MPC’s Chaz Mostert took five race wins to take hold a comfortable lead from Audi teammate Luke King after the opening four rounds.
It was much the same in the Fanatec GT World Challenge Australia Powered by AWS as Garth Tander and Yasser Shahin have been victorious four times in their MPC Audi R8 GT3 LMS across the three rounds so far completed.
“We’re obviously very happy that Audi has a strong showing with the wins Chaz has taken so far in the series, what else can I ask for?” Reinke stated.
“Success was built around the GT3, which was the market leader for many years and now we’re about to build up a secondary category (TCR), obviously to be as much the market leader eventually as we have the privilege to be in GT3.”
The importance for a manufacturer to have a strong partner has been emphasised since the global pandemic.
“This is a great privilege to have because at the end for us in Germany, Australia is on the other side of the world,” Reinke explained.
“If we would need to have more of a guiding hand in the operation, it would be challenging and near impossible now with the pandemic situation.
“We are very fortunate to have a great operation down there as a partner with MPC.”