SUPERCARS champion Rick Kelly says he does not miss the category which he long was a fixture in.
Kelly ranks seventh on the all-time ATCC/Supercars Championship race starts list with 580 in a career that spanned two decades (2001-20) and was headlined by a title and two Bathurst 1000 wins.
The Victorian, who is still just 42 years of age, made the shock call to go cold turkey at the end of 2020 when he undoubtedly could have at least pressed on as an enduro co-driver.
But Kelly has no regrets, having subsequently pivoted his life to developing Trentham Waters Resort on the outskirts of Mildura.
“I don’t miss it at all, to be honest with you,” Kelly said this week via Sportsday with Cam Luke and Bryce McGain.
“I had a long and enjoyable career of 20 years and I wanted to move into another industry that was a little bit less cutthroat.
“Certainly what I learnt in the racing industry from a business management point of view has allowed me to transition pretty well into another industry. It taught me a lot.
“I don’t miss that competitive side because I still feel that. I mean, I miss driving things at that sort of speed and at that level, but when we set out to build Trentham Waters, the brief between the family group was ‘let’s try to build the best caravan park in Australia’.
“I’m not arrogant enough to stand here and think that we have done that, but we’ve done the very best we could with what we had to build the best one.
“The level of attention to detail in the Palm Springs aesthetic look we’ve put throughout to personalised rubbish bins around with our logo stamped in it.
“I’ve tried to be as competitive as what we possibly can in this industry. I don’t think there’s anyone that does the bin run faster than what I do!”
Elaborating on how his former life as a Supercars team owner had now come in handy, Kelly said: “They’re two very different rulebooks but at the end of the day you look through it and work out what you can build based off what all the rules and regulations are and you get stuck into it.”