Last October, in front of 50,000 spectators at Mount Panorama and a television audience of 2.7 million, Klimenko is short and stocky, with a big personality. "Can you imagine?"

"We next meet at Sydney Motorsport Park, a 4½- kilometre circuit in the city's sprawling west, an hour's drive from the carefully tended lawns of Vaucluse.

And then reality bites." She sniffs the high-octane fuel, hears the throaty roar of a V8 engine and feels transformed.

A shake-up at the beginning of 2016 saw Betty surrounded by new drivers, race cars, and many new faces when she moved her team from Queensland to Victoria. "I run the business like it's my business, and make decisions like it was my arse that was on the line. Betty Klimenko. "You've got the whole fairy tale in your head. Betty and hubby No. "When I met my husband I was 110 kilos," says Klimenko.

"I'm a different person," she says. Similarly, the lower parts of her legs, knees to feet, are shorter than they should be. "Erebus competes in the Supercars Championship, an annual series of 16 race meetings for custom-made cousins of road-going sedans. Klimenko’s family fortune was estimate by BRW to be $960 million in 2013 with her family coming in at No.12 on the Australian rich list.

She swears, she smokes, she has a lot of tattoos. As we drink coffee in her upstairs living room, she says her husband, Daniel Klimenko, likes to tell her, "Sweetheart, you live in an area where they think V8 is a vegetable juice." "I went down to Double Bay, where my girlfriend had a shoe shop, and got so drunk that I invested in an Indian film.

The company's assets include two shopping centres in eastern Sydney (the Westfield-managed Eastgardens, and Supa Centre, Moore Park), office towers in Sydney, California and Oregon, and residential developments in NSW.

"But because I always wear pants, no one really notices. "He said, 'Because I don't love them as much.'

Each year at Bathurst, she puts on a tutu and spends a couple of hours whooping it up in the rowdiest section of the crowd.

It is hard to argue with this, especially when I notice the skull on the side table. 2, Daniel, were married somewhat unconventionally in Vegas. The BRW Rich List placed the family as the 12th-wealthiest in Australia, with an estimated worth of $960 million. Gradually, Klimenko was taken back into the fold.

I relay this to Saunders-Weinberg, who agrees with a laugh that their relationship is good. "These boys would do anything for me," says Klimenko, whose role is part commander-in-chief, part den mother. The traumatic event of her childhood was the sudden death in 1970 of Eta, aged just 42. "Klimenko devoted her first three years in the competition to what can safely be called a failed experiment.

"He was a hard man," Daniel says.Saunders and Lowy, once the closest of business partners, grew apart.

"They treated me exactly how they would treat any new owner," she insists. "But she's not that sort of person," Ryan says.

"I actually love being the eastern suburbs bogan," she says. "My sister, on her 18th birthday, got a Peugeot."

"She treats everybody in our team like they're family," says Erebus general manager Barry Ryan.When Klimenko entered Supercars, she was widely expected to hire a crack race crew, then retire to the corporate hospitality suite to drink champagne.

Betty Klimenko grew up as an heiress to the Westfield fortune. "I get swamped," she says, sounding chuffed. " But others wonder whether being the first woman to solely own a team worked against her.

https://aussiecelebs.com.au/betty-klimenko-wiki-age-husband-net-worth

"He threw himself into work even more than he already had," says Gabriel Kune, his longtime friend and author of the 1999 biographyKlimenko, who loved her father, tells me he treated her and the much younger Monica very differently.

"It's easy for someone with wealth to get into a bit of trouble with the wrong management," Ryan says. "She committed suicide," says Klimenko, who was then 10.From the beginning, Saunders was a frequently absent parent – the burgeoning Westfield business took almost all his time – but in his grief over losing Eta, he withdrew still further from family life.

It seems to Bruce Newton that both Klimenko and Arocca are right: "Not only is there deep-seated misogyny in pit lane, there is no respect for the newcomer. His nonchalance rubbed off on her: "It didn't seem to matter."