Paul Dumbrell

Jamie Whincup isn’t the only driver with ambitions outside of V8 Supercars.

While Whincup has indicated he may quit motorsport at 30, Autobarn Racing’s Paul Dumbrell has combined his love of motor racing with his other passion of fitness.

Dumbrell dreams of scaling a mountain much higher than Bathurst’s Mount Panorama and he hopes his marathon and iron man accomplishments, including the Run Melbourne half marathon he took part in last weekend, are setting him up for such a feat.

The 26-year-old harbours a dream to one day reach the top of Mount Everest.

He finished the 21-kilometre Melbourne marathon in one hour, 24 minutes and nine seconds placing 48th out of 3000 participants and 16th in the 18-29 age group.

Rather than mathematically working out the exact improvement in performance his stringent training offers him, Dumbrell uses his body as a guide.

“I started running five years ago; I’ve lost 10 kilos from when I drove at Castrol and Jack Daniel’s in ‘04 or ‘05,” he said.

“So I was running seven days a week at the Tan (a well known running track in Melbourne), I was doing 3.8 kay and it took me 15 or 16 minutes; I literally thought I was a fitness guru, like you know ‘how good am I, I can run this’.

“But I was running for a maximum of 20 minutes by the time you warm up so when you relate that back to the car I was still fatiguing in the car.”

Dumbrell says the fitness work has helped with his V8 Supercar driving; he now makes sure his endurance in training sessions matches the length of a V8 Supercar race.

“That’s helped me a lot to minimize the small mistakes and poor decisions you can make at the end of the race because you’re used to feeling fatigued,” he explained.

The Autobarn racer trains at least six, if not all seven days a week and his regime includes a session on Tuesday mornings with fellow Walkinshaw drivers Garth Tander, Will Davison and Dave Reynolds, while he runs up to 35 kilometres a session with friends in summer.

But has all of the training paid off for the ‘veteran’ V8 Supercar driver, who celebrates his 10th year in the category this year?

“Results wise I’m definitely not happy, but in terms of where we’ve been and the positions we’ve put ourselves in, I’m really, really happy with that,” he said.

“We probably should have had two top five finishes over in Adelaide, but it wasn’t in the team’s control what happened there; Winton we had good speed and were pretty unlucky to be off the podium and Darwin was the same, the Safety Car knocked us around in those races.”

The Tasmanian event at Symmons Plains was “diabolical” for all of the Walkinshaw cars, according to Dumbrell, but he said that Darwin made up for it.

Accused of holding up Wilson Security Racing’s Fabian Coulthard in the late stages of the Sunday race at Symmons Plains, Dumbrell explained that the introduction of the soft tyre was always going to make it harder to police lapped traffic.

“I got given the blue flag down the back straight and I moved over on the front straight,” he explained.

“(Driving Standards Observer) Tomas Mezera stood up at the driver’s briefing and said it was the most appalling piece of driving that he’s seen. He didn’t mention any names but I relate to what he mentioned so I took it on board, but I play by the rules.

“And the rules were you get a blue flag and you move out of the way. And I did that. I literally got the blue flag on that lap and I moved the first place I could.

“If they want to change the rules I’m happy for them to change rules but let’s make sure they’re the same goalposts for everyone. The goalposts change every race.”

Racing aside, Dumbrell is itching at the chance to take part in this year’s New York Marathon which takes place a week before Bahrain, and he has another much higher and colder goal he wants to achieve down the track.

“I’d love to do Everest; I don’t know if I could do it,” he revealed.

“It’s a lot of time and dedication. Three months up in the mountain trying to get the window open to make sure you get the transcontinental winds and what not.

“It’s one of those pie in the sky things. I could pick a lot of easier things. Base Camp’s definitely achievable; (commentator) Greg Rust went up to Base Camp (at Everest) and K2. There’s a lot of things to do after racing, that’s for sure.”