New engineer for Todd

A new engineer fresh from the United States is set to start with Nissan Motorsport today, to step in and run driver and team boss Todd Kelly.

Kelly started the year with Jesse Walker who, funnily enough, had headed to the States to take up a position with automotive outfit Faraday Future.

Matthew Rumfield will debrief Darwin with the team, and will take the reins after Nissan Motorsport general manager of engineering Perry Kapper stood in to run Kelly at the last round.

Kelly showed strong form finishing seventh on Saturday and qualifying second on Sunday, before being taken out by Mark Winterbottom, who copped a drive through penalty.

Team manager Scott Sinclair was pleased to have Rumfield on-board and was looking forward to some fresh eyes in the department.

“We’ve got a new engineer starting … in time for the brief from Darwin and will work with us ongoing,” Sinclair said.

“He’s come from the US, he’s in NASCAR – he’s a guy we are pretty excited about having on-board to add some depth to the engineering group.

“Perry obviously did a fantastic job [in Darwin] and had a really good weekend with Todd – but the structure we had was working really well as well. So we’re looking forward to filling Jesse’s departure with someone fresh from outside the category.”

Kapper was focused solely on the #7 in Darwin, so was unable to oversee the four cars as usual.

“[At the track] we run it a bit different to some of the other bigger teams,” Sinclair explained of the structure.

“We’ve got, basically, me, Perry and Neil Price [crew chief] across both garages, so there’s one team manager, Perry looks after the engineering on all the cars and Neil looks after the chief mechanic stuff on all the cars.

“So we actually vary which garage we actually stand behind and wander back and forth – so it’s not a set structure.”

The Nissan stable earned its first win since 2013 in Darwin on Saturday, with Michael Caruso behind the wheel.