And while he and his team-mates are it it, they wouldn’t mind being the fastest car down Mount Panorama once more.

Augustine forms part of Daytona Sportscars’ two-car Class I attack on the Bathurst 12 Hour as he will share a seat with Dylan Thomas and Rhys Howell in a Daytona Coupe.

The other entry, the #66 Dodge Viper, will be steered by Ben Schoots, Adam Macrow and Michael Caine around Mount Panorama. It was that car that shocked 12 Hour fans when setting a speed milestone at the track.

“When we did 307 kilometres an hour down Conrod, it was a big deal for us, everyone was amazed that we were 20 kilometres faster than any other car in the field,” Augustine said with pride.

While certainly not the biggest team in terms of budget and personnel, Augustine and his team-mates enjoy the Bathurst 12 Hour just as much as their rivals.

“We love coming up there every year, it’s great for a little team like ours to be in such a big event,” he said.

“We’ve got 25 people, six drivers, two cars. We’ve got guys coming from Queensland, from New South Wales from Victoria, for us it’s a huge logistical operation that we are doing part-time after hours.

“It’s good for people like us who don’t normally get to run in events like this, one of of our guys works in Western Australia on one of the big gas fields, he’s one of our drivers. We’ve got guys who just work in IT just turning up and getting to race against people like Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes.

“It’s pretty cool to be rubbing shoulders with guys like that when most weekends you are normally watching them.

“This is our fifth year and being an amateur team we don’t have professional mechanics, we don’t have professional drivers, we basically have a whole lot of guys who really enjoy motor racing who take time off work and come here for this.”

After placing 29^th outright and sixth in class last year in the Viper, the Daytona Sportcars team is aiming bigger for 2018.

Augustine is well aware of the limitations of the outfit, but is keen to see both cars claim a class podium.

“We often don’t often get the results a lot of the other bigger teams do because we don’t have the money or the practice or a lot of other things you need to do a good job. But everything we’ve learnt from the last few years we’ll use,” he said.

“With two cars there’s definitely pressure to make sure we get one of them to the finish line and have a clean run. What we are really aiming for is to be both cars one and two in the I Class.

“One of the interesting things is that every year we’ve raced, we’ve been the fastest car in I Class but we’ve never won. We got to 45 minutes left with a four-lap lead [in class] about three years ago and we broke the input shaft on the gear box which put us out of the race in the last hour – that was pretty heartbreaking that one.”

While pushing for class honours on the challenging Mount Panorama circuit, Augustine and his team-mates will also have another factor to contend with. They need to make sure they do not hold up those quicker cars vying for outright success.

“It is a little intimidating to tell the truth, it is quite difficult for us to expand our capabilities into a professional arena like this,” Augustine admitted.

“Your job in I Class is not getting in the way of the A Class cars and hopefully they can understand that we are doing our best and don’t just tip us into the fence.

“Hopefully we can see the two blue and white cars running nose to tail lap after lap.”