FEATURE - Rick Kelly & Hell-Bent Garage
Words: Mike Ryan
Photos: Dean Walters, Mike Ryan
Brought to you by Castrol EDGE
Since he retired from racing in the Supercars Championship two years ago, Rick Kelly hasn’t been idle. Instead of lazing by the beach or lounging on the couch, he’s been working hard on bringing a premium holiday park to fruition and working just as hard on wild and wacky projects for a video series called ‘Hell-Bent Garage’.
In 20 years of competition at the highest level of Australian touring car racing, Rick Kelly achieved it all – a V8 Supercars championship, more than a dozen race wins and two Bathurst 1000 victories.
He also ran a variety of machinery in those two decades, from multiple iterations of the Commodore to Nissan’s Altima and the Ford Mustang, with which he concluded his full-time driving career at the end of the 2020 Supercars season.
While Rick still gets the itch to get behind the wheel every now and then, the demands of owning and operating a racing team (Kelly Racing, which was sold to the Grove family last year) is something he’s glad to leave behind.
Fans who’ve followed Rick’s career will know he was born and raised in Mildura, alongside older brother Todd, and it’s in Mildura that he’s turned most of his attention since retirement. On a block of land the family purchased in Trentham Cliffs (on the NSW side of the Murray near Mildura), Rick’s in the process of creating ‘Trentham Waters,’ a premium RV park that’ll offer much more than just a place to park your motorhome or caravan.
“It’ll have a resort-style pool, a splash park and everything from high-end retreats on the water to glamping tents, 2- and 3-bedroom villas, drive-through camping sites - the whole thing,” Rick explains. “It’s taken two years, working with the council, getting plans done and so on, but we’re now at the point where we can start building.”
Although Trentham Waters is in NSW, Rick now lives in outer suburban Melbourne, and there’s another project much closer to home – right next door to it in fact – that’s also keeping him occupied.
Hell-Bent Garage
Ever since he was boy, Rick has loved tinkering, pulling cars, bikes and other machines apart, then (mostly!) putting them back together again.
“I’m extremely talented at thinking projects aren’t going to be that hard to do, then finding out the opposite!” Rick laughs.
Rick’s 8-year-old son Lex has inherited the same tinkering gene, as he loves to spend time in the family’s extensive shed, too, but it’s fair to say his ‘pull apart’ to ‘put back together’ ratio is a bit worse than Rick’s!
Combining those passions and sharing them with a wider audience by broadcasting their projects on YouTube seemed a natural progression, and thus, the Hell-Bent Garage video series was born this year.
“The shed took four years to build, with the help of my Dad and family,” Rick says gesturing to the expansive space that holds not only the projects for the Hell-Bent Garage, but Rick’s own cars, memorabilia from his Supercars days, several work benches, a lounge area, bar, gym and storage.
The ‘Hell-Bent’ name has some history with Rick, going back to the dawn of his time in Supercars in 2002. Back then, the 19-year-old was in his first season in the V8 Supercar Championship with the Holden Young Lions, having secured the Australian Drivers’ Championship in Formula Holden competition the year before, preceded by a runner-up finish in the Australian Formula Ford Championship in 2000.
Hell-Bent started as a t-shirt label, but the brand and the name has remained close to Rick’s heart, so when it came time to give the workshop and resulting video series a name, Hell-Bent Garage seemed the ideal fit.
“I had the idea in the back of my mind for a while,” Rick explains. “And I had a lot of comments from people saying we should really capture what we’re doing here already and share it with people.”
Presented by Castrol, Hell-Bent Garage is an ongoing series on YouTube, where Rick and Lex will take seemingly disparate projects and bring them to life in new ways.
“Every project embarked on as part of the Hell-Bent Garage has to be extremely unique - we won’t just be getting a Commodore and lowering it!”
Reflecting that commitment to the unusual and unique, the first project in the series (which launched on YouTube in August) is a burnt-out Harley-Davidson Fat Boy that was rescued from the wreckers and is in the process of being converted into a high-powered trike that can drift.
This isn’t being done just for show; the finished trike will be fully functional, and if the people from the Guinness World Records get on board, a turbo will be strapped to it with the aim of setting a record for the world’s most powerful drift trike.
It’s this kind of quirky project that typifies what’s still to come from Hell-Bent Garage, too, with a jet-powered remote control car (reimagining a project Rick created as a teenager) and a big Ford C600 cabover truck in the pipeline for future episodes.
The drift trike has been labelled the ‘Widowmaker’, but maybe it should have been named the 'Heartbreaker', as bringing this busted Harley back from the dead has seen Rick and Lex encounter all sorts of problems, from busted forks and sandblasting mishaps to the peculiarities of Harley-Davidson parts and the need to source bespoke tools.
It’s been frustrating at times – as all projects can be – but Rick’s enjoying the ride and enjoying sharing the progress of the project with Lex, who’s undeniably the star of the show.
“Lex likes the TV and YouTube side of things – he really opened my eyes to what we could do with YouTube. Without him, I’d just be working quietly by myself in the shed,” Rick laughs.
Check out the episodes of Hell-Bent Garage already online and you’ll see Lex is a natural in front of the camera. That actually became apparent a couple of years earlier, when Supercars drafted in the vivacious 5-year-old to roam the pitlane at a couple of rounds of the 2020 season and ask drivers the tough questions.
On the process of rebuilding and transforming the Widowmaker drift trike, Rick’s been handling things like the engine rebuilding, but Lex does things like painting and can operate tools like a media blaster, welder and grinder. He also offers plenty of advice to his hardworking dad!
“It’s important for me to have Lex be a part of the trike’s build, so when it’s finished, he can look at it and go, ‘I did that bit, I welded this, I bolted that on’ and so on,” Rick adds.
Rick and Lex do almost all the filming themselves, with family drafted in to work the cameras as needed, while a production company in Sydney handle the editing and advise on elements to be added or re-shot before an episode is finalised and uploaded to YouTube.
The Widowmaker was already sitting at five episodes on the Hell-Bent Garage channel at time of writing, with another four likely to see the project through to completion, after which it’ll be offered to series sponsors like Castrol to display at events and use in their own marketing initiatives.
Long-lasting Oil
Rick’s connection to Castrol wasn’t born with this video series. In fact, it goes all the way back to 2003, when he was part of the Kmart Racing Team and scored that first Bathurst 1000 victory.
“We’ve had great success together and ran the Castrol-branded Supercar in the last few years of my racing career, which was really cool,” Rick says, recalling a rival team that were sponsored by another oil brand, but were using Castrol because it was superior to the sponsor’s product!
“After a year away from Supercars, Castrol got in touch and said, ‘We’d still love for you to be involved with the brand’. I really love the opportunity to work with brands like that. It meant a lot to me to represent them on the race car when I drove, so to continue with that is pretty cool for me.”
In terms of the Castrol connection continuing into the Hell-Bent Garage series, they are deeply involved, using the engine specs and data on what’s planned for each project (that's sent to them by Rick) to recommend which oil to use, so it’s far more than just adding their name to the title, which Rick really appreciates.
“The way we did things together as a team when I was racing has flowed through to what we’re doing here, as well.”
All the Castrol products and memorabilia that dot the Hell-Bent Garage weren’t brought in for the series – Rick already had them as the result of his long association with the brand, from vintage jugs and tallboys, to Castrol-branded garagenalia.
“Actually, all the people involved in Hell-Bent Garage are people like Castrol that I’ve had a relationship with for many years,” Rick adds. “Castrol’s the presenting partner, but there’s brands like FXD, Snap-on Tools and Cigweld, that I’ve dealt with for a long time, too.”
The Future of Hell-Bent
It’s early days for Hell-Bent Garage, but Rick’s already looking ahead and thinking about projects for the next five years, although he jokingly says that the current crop of project might still be in progress then!
“It’s been a lot of work to get Hell-Bent Garage up and running, but now we’ve got it running and have a good relationship with the crew that produce it, we’ve just got to put in the time to get each project done.”
If he needs to, Rick can call on his brother Todd and the manufacturing and fabrication resources of Kelly Racing, which still exists (just not in the Supercars sense) and recently developed a racing Ranger Raptor for the Baja 1000 in Mexico.
“I’ve had Todd’s son Mason help me on one of the episodes, so when push comes to shove on the Widowmaker or other projects, we’ll hopefully get Todd and a few other guest appearances,” Rick says.
As far as Lex's potential to follow his father's footsteps into Supercars, Rick says he’s shown an interest in go karting and some aptitude for it, too, but it’s early days. Rick certainly doesn’t have any burning ambition to see him in Supercars or F1. He’s happy for him to pursue whatever sporting – or non-sporting - direction he wants to take.
For now, as long as he and Lex can keep working together in the Hell-Bent Garage, creating some unique projects and having a lot of fun along the way, Rick says he’ll be more than happy.
Kelly family F100
The classic ’56 F100 seen in this article was built by Hughes Stepside Bodies to the commission of Rick and his dad John a few years ago and features a tough 351 Cleveland V8 that was built by Kelly Racing, matched to a Ford C6 automatic.
Disc brakes are fitted all round and the front end’s out of a Mitsubishi L300, while the IRS rear came from a Jaguar – all standard stuff for rodded classic pickups like this.
What sets this pickup apart is its Kelly Racing performance V8, low stance and gleaming black paint that's complemented by oversized (20-inch) Detroit Steel smoothies with low-profile Gripmax tyres
Polished timber lines the tub and real leather fills with the cabin, with other amenities including illuminated Dolphin gauges, power windows and a modern sound system.
