At a workshop in Hume, there's an engineering program underway aimed at building a world-class rally car capable of bringing the national title back to Canberra.
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The prestigious Australian rally championship hasn't sat in ACT hands since 11 years ago, when Neal Bates won it for his fourth and final time.
Now the final shellwork is being completed for a second R5 Toyota Yaris rally car which will effectively give the team two red-hot chances at the 2019 title.
Neal's older son Harry, now a full-time professional, will be behind the wheel of the brand new car, while his younger son Lewis will campaign the R5 Yaris which Harry drove last season.
This latest project started its working life as an ordinary 1.3-litre road car bought from a car dealer in Mitchell for just $6000.
But by the time the Bates team is finished with it, very little of the original will remain.
The body is being fully customised to accommodate its turbocharged competition engine, a six-speed sequential gearbox, a completely new suspension system and all-wheel drive.
To get the second Yaris rally car finished, tested and trucked all the way across the country to Perth for the opening round of the championship on April 5 will be a race in itself.
"We are on target for the WA rally but timewise, it will be a little tight," Bates confirmed this week.
"Hopefully the shell will be finished by early February, the gearbox will arrive from France in a few weeks, then it's a matter of assembling everything and going testing."
It all sounds quite simple, but in the typical Bates style of under-promising and over-delivering, it is an astonishing feat for a small workshop in Canberra to build the same car that a huge, specialised workshop in Finland turns out for the Toyota factory team.
Only about a dozen of these Yaris rally cars exist worldwide, and by next month two of them will have been built in Canberra.
The first of the Yaris R5 cars rolled out of the Hume workshop in late 2017, with Harry Bates and John McCarthy competing in the brand new car through season 2018 and winning the penultimate round in South Australia to set up a late charge at the national rally title.
However, a single loose camshaft bolt caused its retirement at the final round at Rally Australia in November.
Bates says that building a second, near-identical car is easier because the team now has a template to follow.
However, there's still hundreds of careful hours that go into modifying and welding the body to accommodate an integrated safety cage, plus resculpting the wheel housings, suspension towers, transmission tunnel and floorpan.
"Making the body of the car as rigid, as safe and as light as we possibly can is really important," Bates said.
"When all the flex is removed from the body, the suspension can then be adjusted and tuned very accurately. And we are bang on target to make the minimum category weight of 1230kg."
To further compound Bates' busy 2019 schedule, his team will again be supporting the Toyota 86 racing series, a one-make national sports car championship which runs on a similar program as the V8 Supercars.
The first of the sports car races is at Victoria's Phillip Island racetrack, one week after the WA rally.
So as he drives one truck home to Canberra, his team will head south in a second truck, taking four FT86 sports racing cars in a trailer to Phillip Island. Bates will then jump in the car and drive to Victoria in time to be at the track for the following weekend's racing.
"It's a tough schedule, but we have done this before and I really like driving the truck, so that helps," he said.
