Snow River Racing arrives at Symmons Plains with two of its drivers chasing personal milestone races and the third nursing a freshly sprained left wrist, the kind of build-up that has the team's drivers laughing nervously about a private superstition.
Speaking on Supercars' Drivers Only podcast ahead of the Tasmania Super 440, David Reynolds, who closes in on 500 career Supercars starts in the coming rounds, said the Snow River garage has been bracing for the round all month.
"With milestone races, they never go well ever," Reynolds said. "Honestly, like everyone says 500's like the worst you'll ever go and I had this going into the round and I'm like, no, I'm not going to tell anyone, because then it might come true. And then like 100 metres into the race someone spun in front of me and my car was finished. Like, I crashed, it was a massive strike, completely ruined. I literally just got past the finish line and there's two cars spin in front of me."
Teammate Kai Allen is approaching his own 250-race round and was honest that the talk had not eased the pressure.
"It kind of got, like, not spoken about because you were the show, you were the star of the show, right?" Allen said. "500 is a big number. And for half of them I've been your teammate."
For third Snow River driver Matt Payne, the round is more pragmatic. The young Tasmanian came into Symmons Plains with a sprained left wrist sustained in a mountain-bike fall during the Supercars break. Payne has been open about the injury and is confident he can race.
"I was going through this corner, wasn't even that fast and then yeah, just sort of slipped the front and then sort of pulled my hands out, and then it was just a bit sore but it's not broken," Payne said. "It's not broken or anything like that. So just sprain. I've got a sprain. We're just getting it all ready to go."
"Do you ever not do something because of the potential cause of injury?" Reynolds asked.
"Yeah, for sure," Payne replied. "There's a lot of stuff I'd love to do. I'd love to just have a crack at riding a motorbike somewhere — on a dirt track. But it's when there's a motor involved, it's very dangerous. Because I know that knowing me, I'll just get too confident."
The candid exchange leaned into a story Payne shared from earlier in his career, when he broke his collarbone less than two weeks before the 2023 Newcastle 500 in a low-speed fall riding a small dirt bike on a friend's property.
"I was building dirt jumps and the Bobcat was about to run out of fuel," Payne said. "So I'm like, all right, I'll go. I ride the little 110 motorbike back to the shed to grab the ute with a big diesel tank on the back. I just wasn't thinking and I hit a boulder pretty fast. Just like one of those Instagram videos, just across the ground. Then I knew straight away I snapped it."
Payne raced through the resulting plated injury at Newcastle and said the cycle of training, recovering and racing teaches drivers to ride a different risk calculus to fans.
"When you're younger, you're just worried about hurting yourself and not going racing," Reynolds said. "So I stopped skiing for years and now I just don't care anymore. So I'll just do whatever. Like we ride our bikes on the road, which is way more dangerous than going skiing or anything like that."
Symmons Plains hosts the Tasmania Super 440 across Friday-Sunday, with two 200-kilometre races and a sequence of pit-stop strategy windows that have historically rewarded Triple Eight, Erebus and the DJR Penske teams. Reynolds, Payne and Allen line up with the Snow River garage knowing one tough weekend at Reynolds' milestone round could swing momentum back to the Camaro pack.
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