Supercars guru on his time with Subaru & Makinen
- 15th March 2024, 2:41pm
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by Luke Whitten
Engineer Phil Keed has enjoyed a career spanning two decades in Supercars, but his story in rallying both in Australia and overseas is relatively unknown.
Keed appears on the latest episode of the V8 Sleuth Podcast and explains his story from Ralliart Australia to the Subaru World Rally Team.
Fresh from University, Keed was picked up by Ralliart Australia full-time, and several typical sliding doors moments meant he was soon on a flight to England ready to work at Prodrive.
It was some years before when that seed had been planted in his head, though, aided by one of the most famous moments in World Rally Championship history.
“I think it was 1997 … we were at the Bunnings stage south of Perth and we were all hanging out because our car was miles down the list,” Keed explained on the podcast.
“We were sitting on a rock with everyone else and down came Colin (McRae) and he put it so high in the air on that jump in a really iconic moment.
“I just wanted to be a part of that team. The colours, the car and everything about it.
“It wasn’t F1, it wasn’t anything else. I just wanted to work in the Subaru World Rally Team. I knew what I wanted very passionately, but I wasn’t planning very much of it at any stage.”
At the point of McRae’s legendary jump, he was working with Ed Ordynski and Ralliart Australia, but a chance meeting at one of the memorable Rally Australia after-parties was what got him to that ‘dream’ job.
He joined Prodrive in the late 1990s and had a stint in their customer racing department assisting the likes of Morten Ostberg and Possum Bourne before he switched to the main WRC team.
“I did a couple of years in the customer team and I did some rallies with Toshi Arai in the world rally team when they did a third car,” Keed said.
“Part of the way through 2001 I switched across and ran Markko Martin for the rest of that season.
“I got Tommi Makinen (in 2002) which was certainly a pretty interesting experience.
“I didn’t know too much about the Finnish racing drivers or Tommi for that matter. He was another hero (I had) in a way.
“He’s mercurial, and as a natural driver, was just the most incredible guy and had tremendous success. He was fiery and uncompromising. He would get really angry or explosive in some ways. It was a really interesting experience.”
Keed talks through his rallying career with V8 Sleuth’s Aaron Noonan through the hour-long podcast.
He goes into further detail on Makinen, the parties, and the tricky time he had dealing with the Finn, in contrast to the receptive Petter Solberg, who was also in the Subaru team at the time.
