Brendan Lines

February 17, 2020

Holden’s presence in Australian motorsport is in free fall after the announcement General Motors will retire the Holden brand in a press conference in Melbourne this afternoon.

Just weeks after its livery reveal this could be the Red Bull Holden Racing Team’s last Holden Supercar – Image: Red Bull

GM’s association with all its top flight motorsport partnerships including Supercars and HSV is facing grim uncertainty.

GM Holden interim chairman and managing director Kristian Aquilina said Holden will be meeting with its key partners very soon.

“On our future in racing we’ve made a commitment, and certainly we need to sit down with our partners Supercars and certainly the Red Bull Holden Racing Team, Triple Eight which we’ll do hopefully in the coming days, we’ll talk about the appropriate transition, but our intention is to still go racing in 2020 whilst we’ve still got Holden vehicles out there in dealer showrooms,

“To the extent about GM and its involvement in racing beyond that will be part of the same conversation, there’s certainly a lot of new news for us and our partners to process, these decisions are only taken in the last few days, we’re communicating it with the Australian community as soon as we could, and we’ve got some work to do over the next few weeks and months ahead to work through those arrangements that go well beyond motorsport,” he said.

GM’s Kristian Aquilina (left) and Julian Blissett (right) speaking at the Melbourne press conference – Image: ABC News

Quite clearly while there are Commodore’s on the road they will be on the track.

Yet that may not be the case for much longer as the carmaker intends to wind-up production at its Port Melbourne facility by June 2020.

Not only is every partnership with Holden in motorsport likely change drastically after the brand is retired, GM International operations senior vice president Julian Blissett said there is some saving grace perhaps for GM speciality vehicles.

“Although its not firmed up, formally our intent and our desire is to basically stay in the market, albeit in a different market and model with the GM specialty vehicles,

“We are in negotiations with our partners to make that happen and that is still work in progress.”

Products like the right-hand drive Corvette will still be available off the back of strong international sales says Blissett.

Red Bull Holden Racing Team made an official statement ahead of the Supercars season opener at Adelaide this weekend on social media.