But that’s exactly the case at Brad Jones Racing’s East Albury base.

When less than a second can separate first and 20th on the grid, time is of the essence for Jones and his team of 43 workers.

That’s why they have two 15-minute pit-stop practice sessions every day with an old Ford Falcon fitted out to replicate a V8 Supercar.

“Towards the end of my driving career we were struggling for competitiveness and we didn’t look as sharp as we needed to and we didn’t get the job done,” Jones said.

“When I retired one of our goals was to change a few things to get back to the front and things like building a pit-stop car and speeding up the stops make a difference.

“Now we are one of the top-three cars in the pits, day-in, day-out.

“We rotate guys through the shop so that we’ve got more than one guy who can fill a particular role.

“We operate on half the budget of some of the bigger teams so it’s really important when we get an opportunity that we make the most of it and get some sort of reward out of it.”

Pit-stop practice is just one cog in the machine that drives Jones’ team.

There’s engineers, mechanics, fabricators and painters everywhere you look as the team leaves no stone unturned to have the cars ready for the opening weekend of the V8 Supercars season in Adelaide in March.

The Team BOC, Freightliner and Team CoolDrive cars to compete in the V8 championship are built almost entirely in East Albury, from the chassis up.

“It’s a matter of stripping down the old cars, rebuilding them and updating them,” he said.

“Even though the rules are very strict with what you can and can’t do, you’re always trying to find little things that you can do to to improve the car.

“We spend 99 per cent of our time doing research and development to try and improve the cars, make it go faster, make it more reliable, or make it more consistent.”

Jones, who runs BJR with brother Kim, said he often had to pinch himself at how big the multi-million dollar business had become. BJR is the only V8 Supercars team based in regional Australia.

“It has its positives and negatives not being based in one of the major cities. For us, it’s like having an AFL team here,” he said.

“It’s pretty crazy that Kim and I started out as a couple of kids - our dad was president of the car club here in Albury and used to have a race circuit out under the Hume Weir - and now it’s grown from that, to this without really any planning.”