'I was done': Tander credits Supercars career to Garry Rogers

Garth Tander has credited his career and successes to the late Garry Rogers, who will be farewelled in Melbourne today.

The Supercars Hall of Famer’s life will be celebrated at a Thursday funeral service following his death late last month, aged 80. Tander led the tributes to Rogers, who was also celebrated at the Gold Coast in the days after his passing.

Rogers championed youth, handing several future stars a crack in Supercars. Notably, he gave Tander a crack, and he duly won the 2000 Bathurst 1000 with Jason Bargwanna.

After being on the sidelines after winning the 1997 Formula Ford title, Tander was called up to Garry Rogers Motorsport midway through the 1998 season, replacing UK-bound Steven Richards.

Tander delivered for Rogers, winning the Great Race and finishing championship runner-up in 2000. He remained with the team until 2004, before moving to the Walkinshaw fold. Between 2005 and 2016, Tander won the 2007 championship and added two Bathurst wins in 2009 and 2011, before returning to GRM in 2017.

“If it wasn’t for Garry Rogers, I wouldn’t be a Supercar driver at all, let alone having any sort of success,” Tander said on the Rusty’s Garage podcast.

“Literally, I had no options as a kid that just won the Formula Ford Championship, spent all the money that Mum and Dad had, exhausted all the sponsorship that we could gather.

“That was it. I was done. So, if it wasn’t for Garry, then this phase of my life, that direction in my life would not have happened.”

Tander contested two more seasons with GRM before he was replaced by Richie Stanaway in 2019 amid a sponsorship shortfall. He quickly scored a plum Triple Eight co-drive, and added two more Bathurst wins in 2020 and 2022.

He then shifted to Grove Racing, where he has applied Rogers’s learning to the now championship-contending Ford team. In a full circle moment, Tander won the Bathurst 1000 last month with Matt Payne. As fate would have it, Tander was joined on the podium with two former GRM racers in Lee Holdsworth and James Golding.

“In my role at Grove Racing, where I help with the direction of the race team with Stephen Grove and Brenton Grove, we were looking at driver options for this year,” Tander said.

“When Kai Allen became an option, I was like, ‘wow, we’re going to have two kids. We’re going to have Matt Payne, who was 22 at the time, and we’re going to have a 19-year-old’.

“I said to Stephen and Brenton, I remember way back when I started at GRM, we had Jason Bargwanna and myself.

“No one believed in youth at that stage, and we built something pretty cool. That was way back in the early 2000s, and I think we can do the same today.

“I was inspired from what Garry did with us way back then. That gave me the confidence that we could do what we needed to do with two young drivers today, and it seems to be working out okay.

“I never got the opportunity to tell Garry that, but that’s something that sticks with me today, the opportunity for young drivers. He proved that all the way through the lifetime of GRM.”