{"id":740194,"date":"2026-06-16T13:18:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/740194\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T13:18:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T13:18:17","slug":"supercars-david-cauchis-forgotten-season-at-lucas-dumbrell-motorsport","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/740194\/","title":{"rendered":"Supercars: David Cauchi’s forgotten season at Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport"},"content":{"rendered":"

IT was the low-profile apprenticeship that laid the foundations for multiple championship-winning campaigns to come.<\/p>\n

With David Cauchi resurfacing in the motorsport scene on the weekend<\/a> comes an opportune moment to reflect on the oft-forgotten time he was seconded to Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport in 2013.<\/p>\n

Cauchi by then had already been part of the fabric at Triple Eight for years, but career progression was tough to come by given Mark Dutton and Jeromy Moore were entrenched as Jamie Whincup<\/a> and Craig Lowndes<\/a>\u2019 respective race engineers.<\/p>\n

Hence the move to farm Cauchi out to a customer outfit, overseeing the #88 VF Commodore of Dean Fiore<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was tough to not be involved in the core race team, with the Red Bull team,\u201d Cauchi said via a V8 Sleuth Podcast episode released earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was still in the factory every day other than when I was flying to Melbourne to spend a day or two at the Dumbrell factory.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a funny year, but it was good. Again, I\u2019d never race engineered before, so I guess it was a lower pressure way of learning the craft a little bit.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou had to sort of blood yourself somehow and I guess that was a good way. It was a good opportunity for me to learn and for them to see if I was capable of doing it at some point.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a tough year, it was very disjointed. I\u2019m a big believer that you have got to be present at work, in the factory, around the team, so it was a bit disjointed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe sort of made it work well enough. The results for that team weren\u2019t amazing, but it was a good way to start to learn race engineering in practice, race engineering 101.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Fiore finished the year ranked 24th of the 28 full-time drivers, with a season-best result of ninth at Symmons Plains.<\/p>\n

Cauchi subsequently got the nod to race engineer Jamie Whincup for 2014, with Dutton stepping into the team manager void left by Holden Racing Team-bound Adrian Burgess.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was huge; going in to race engineer a five-time champion is a big deal,\u201d Cauchi recalled.<\/p>\n

He went on to guide Whincup and later Shane van Gisbergen to title glory before leading Grove Racing\u2019s rise in a four-year stint (2022-25) as team principal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IT was the low-profile apprenticeship that laid the foundations for multiple championship-winning campaigns to come. With David Cauchi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":740195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-740194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}