JESS Dane says the “bombshell” that was Triple Eight’s defection to Ford ended up sparking a net win for Supercars.

American-based Dane, a former Triple Eight co-owner who was working for General Motors at the time, gave an insider’s perspective to the chain reaction set off by the January 2025 announcement.

“GM Motorsports in the US didn’t put any money into Supercars at all at that point and hadn’t done for a while – any budget was purely from the GM Australia budget,” Dane said via the Girls On The Grid podcast.

“And that really lit a fire in GM Motorsports in the US up their arse, which is great.

“Like I was really happy to see that bounce back and suddenly they’re like ‘okay, we need to get Supercars on the same program as NASCAR with the data sharing and stuff like that, and we need to get a program manager, and we need to get an engineer. We need to do this properly if we’re going to have our name on it’.

“I was like, ‘fantastic’: it’s a real shame that it took losing the strongest team, but I’m really happy that GM is now back properly engaged in Supercars, and also at a great time with Toyota coming in as well.”

Dane, whose father Roland has this year taken on team principal duties at Chevrolet-aligned PremiAir Racing, doubled down on the positivity attached to increased manufacturer investment in Supercars.

“Obviously I know how much GM is putting into it, and I have a rough idea of what Ford and Toyota are putting into it, and we’re not talking the dollars of the old days but it’s still something,” she said.

“The belief in the series is almost more important than the dollars.”

Dane also opened up on her July 2024 exit from the Triple Eight ownership fold, when she sold her 30 percent stake to Earl Evans and Steve Blackmore.

Pic: Supplied

“I knew it was the right choice, to do that,” she said.

“I couldn’t give everything that I wanted to and that I felt I needed to, like even just to stay involved.

“I was like, ‘yeah I can still be on the board, that should be fine’ but in order to be an effective board member you actually need to know what’s going on.

“You can’t make decisions about stuff unless you are well informed, and it was just too hard for me personally to be like ‘yes, I can give Triple Eight everything I want while I’m here but I also need to put everything that I can into creating a good life here as well in the US’.

“Ultimately it turned out to be a good thing because that would have been a slight conflict of interest, working for GM and Triple Eight being like ‘we’re going to go to Ford!’”

It was announced earlier this month that Dane has departed GM, where she most recently had been Corvette Racing program manager.

Mini Metal: Garry Rogers and GRM machines

Lovers of 1:18 scale diecast model cars gather around – the Diecast Detective is back for a deep dive into the remarkable world of Mini Metal!