Its late November 2016, we have demobilised from Gold Coast 600 site in Surfers Paradise, we have mobilised construction for the 2017 Clipsal 500 in Adelaide and we are in the final week of building the last ever Coates Hire Sydney 500.

It’s a bitter-sweet feeling for our team. We are absolutely jumping-out-our-skin excited for Newcastle in November next year, but we have loved our time in Sydney Olympic Park.The blood, sweat and tears our team put into the first year at Homebush, as it was then, has given a few of us a special connection to the space and people whom we achieved it with. Everyone who works in the Event Industry can understand this.

It’s when you go so hard for a long period of time getting that first-time event delivered, your workmates are your family, you’re operating purely on adrenaline and it’s not uncommon for deliriousness to take over at any time of the day.

In that first year, iEDM was engaged in February and tasked with the design, engineering, delivery of $20M civil works and fabrication and the planning and delivery of the overlay for the Event in the first week of December.

It was a massive undertaking and for the project team who worked on the project, incredibly rewarding to successfully get to the end. There are some fantastic memories from that period and the 8 years following.We learnt a lot from that Event in the first year. Whilst we have to balance stakeholder interface on all projects, the Sydney 500 was the first Event we had delivered that had such a high level of external stakeholder interface due to the chosen Government delivery model.

The result was that we were accountable for every single minute of construction and that was a great thing. It directly lead to improvements across the board in iEDM delivery practices which have since continued to service us well.Without naming names, we would like to pass on a massive Thank You to the persons and organisations that we dealt with throughout the lifetime of the project who assisted us deliver the Event every year:

• Sydney Olympic Park Authority
• Destination New South Wales
• Homebush Motor Racing Authority (now disbanded)
• Royal Agricultural Society
• ANZ Stadium
• QUDOS Bank Arena

It also reminds us of some great memories on the project with the V8/iEDM team who have since moved onto other things – Ben J, Christian B, Garth T, Sando, Brett R, Sam A, Nigel, Sam R, Andrew S to name a few. Also, great big shout out to all of the Contractors and Suppliers who have played their enormous roles in this Event!!

Bring on the next week in SOP! And then, Newcastle 2017 – it’s shaping up to be an absolutely amazing Event.