PETER Adderton has shed light on the high-profile split between his Boost Mobile brand and Supercars champion Brodie Kostecki.
Guest starring on Scott Pye’s Apex Hunters United podcast with Will Brown, Adderton recalled his version of events from when Kostecki agreed to return to Erebus Motorsport after sitting out the first two rounds of 2024.
“I remember the call. I was in California, it was a Sunday afternoon, and I saw the call come in from Brodie,” said Adderton.
“I took it and I was upbeat because every time I talk to Brodie – we’d been checking in to see how he was going, because he was having a pretty hard time. He’s a racer and he wanted to race.
“I said, ‘Brodie, how’s it going? We’re still trying to put you in a NASCAR, we’re still trying to do this’.
“He goes, ‘I’ve got to tell you something’. I said, ‘what’s that?’ He goes, ‘I’m going back to Erebus… and it gets worse: they’ve told me I have to take my Boost sticker off the helmet’.”
Adderton pins the blame on Kostecki’s support network more so than the driver himself.
“I’m going to give Brodie the benefit of the doubt here. I think he got poor advice, really bad advice,” he continued.
“And I think because he’s such a hardcore racer, I’ve never met anybody who races so hard and is so focused on racing.”
Adderton revealed his conversation with Kostecki’s long-time mentor Paul Morris where he said he told the latter “you just killed the guy’s career” and a subsequent ill-fated effort to smooth the waters.
“Here’s the funny thing. I tell Paul, ‘we’re done, I’m not going to do anything’. The fact that Barry (Ryan, Erebus CEO) has made him take (the Boost sticker off his helmet),” he said.
“Paul says to me, ‘don’t worry, I’ll fix it’. He rings me back about 10 minutes later and says, ‘alright, I think we can work with Barry and you can put your sticker back on Brodie’s helmet’.
“I said, ‘fuck you. You don’t dump us, we’re not like some girlfriend you can dump and you find out you might have upset her and you bring her back’.”
Adderton did however share hopes that Kostecki can rebound from the ordeal and is even leaving the door open for a possible reunion.
“If he picked up the phone to me tomorrow and said ‘Pete, I want to come and have lunch with you’, I’d take the lunch in 30 seconds,” he said.
Brown, whose upcoming NASCAR Cup Series debut comes with primary backing from Adderton’s MobileX, continues to be close friends with former teammate Kostecki.
“We worked so well together there (at Erebus) and we’re still great mates,” he said.
“We pushed that team. Brodie did a fantastic job last year to even lift the team.
“His expectation to how his car had to arrive at the track was high; higher than mine even. If it showed up with dirt on it, he was like ‘you didn’t look at that spot, you have to lift your level because if it’s showing up dirty you haven’t cleaned it, you haven’t checked there’.
“I had a lot of respect for him in that way and the team had a lot of respect for him as well. He didn’t go about it in a bad way but he let them know the standard that he expected and that made me better in some ways.
“I probably dumbed him down in some ways. He was a probably bit angry when we first became teammates and I probably pulled him back a bit there and we got along well, and he probably boosted me up in certain areas.”
