How ex-DJR engineer unlocked Hill's AGP boilover

Cameron Hill has hailed the “awesome addition” of new Race Engineer Caleb Mutsaerts, who helped Matt Stone Racing taste victory just five races into 2025.

Hill’s first Supercars win, taken in Race 5 in Melbourne, also came in 24-year-old Mutsaerts’ seventh race as a lead engineer.

After a short stint with MSR in 2022, Mutsaerts spent the last two seasons with Dick Johnson Racing, and filled in as Will Davison’s engineer in Tasmania.

In a restructure at MSR, Mutsaerts joined the team on Hill’s #4 entry, with driver and engineer gelling immediately to cause a big upset.

Crucially, Mutsaerts is now all-in for Hill, with former engineer Paul Forgie promoted to technical coordinator, having balanced several duties last season.

With Forgie now overseeing the team, Hill has the full bandwidth of Mutsaerts, which has proven crucial to driver and engineer finding all the answers required to reach the front and convert to results.

“Caleb is an awesome addition,” Hill said on The Driver’s Seat radio show.

“He’s really young, he’s only 24, everyone when they find that out, is absolutely gobsmacked, because he’s got a really mature head on his shoulders.

“His time at DJR, he did learn a lot, he was underneath some great engineers there too.

“One thing that we definitely struggled with the last couple of years was everyone being pushed for bandwidth, and everyone having to do multiple jobs.

“Now, Caleb can sit there, comb through the data, field the million questions I have as well, so I’ve had a lot of prep time before events going through everything.

“We’ve got such a good balance now of people, everyone’s found their place."

Melbourne was a big turnaround for MSR, which left Sydney last in the teams’ championship.

Hill said there was little panic leaving Sydney, however, yet admitted surprise by just how fast MSR was out of the blocks at Albert Park.

“We walked away from Sydney and went, how’s this happened? We’re bloody last in the teams’ points,” Hill said.

“It didn’t feel like we were that bad at all. I felt like I had a good car, I had some good qualifyings, and we just had some bad luck in the races.

“It was a similar story for Nick. We didn’t have much go our way. I wasn't stressed, because I saw we had a good group of people, and we’re all gelling really well.

"The Tickford boys that weekend were insane, we go, okay maybe we need to look for where we need more speed. We came into AGP with lower expectations.

“We’ve got to be happy if we crack into the top 10, that’s a good outcome for us. But it was pretty clear very early on in practice, that the cars were speedy.”

Hill and Percat jumped to eighth and 10th, and MSR from 12th to fifth, heading to the next round in New Zealand. Tickets for the April 11-13 event are on sale now.