Camaros filled the top four in the Race 11 results and the top six in today’s Race 12 of the Repco Supercars Championship, as well as the top three to six in the four qualifying sessions and shootouts held at Hidden Valley.
The Darwin venue is notable for having near enough to the second-longest straight on the calendar, shorter only than Conrod Straight (and barely shorter than Mountain Straight), with speed trap figures in February’s season-opener at Mount Panorama pointing to the possibility of a straight-line disparity.
Senior figures from Blue Oval teams highlighted straight-line speed as a concern in the official Ford Performance press release, which is a standard issue on a Sunday night at the conclusion of a Supercars weekend.
Grove Racing team owner Stephen Grove said via that release, “We’re losing too much time on the straight.”
Walkinshaw Andretti United Team Principal Carl Faux remarked in the same communication, “The fundamental car-engine combination just doesn’t seem to balance out around here for the blue side.
“It’s not for any lack of trying on all the Ford teams’ part.”
Then, Tickford Racing’s Team Principal of the day, Tim Edwards, claimed “the parity keeps getting triggered constantly,” and so it was that an official parity review was announced days later.
This time around, with Edwards in the hotseat as Supercars’ General Manager of Motorsport, the conjecture should be cleared up in a highly scientific manner in coming weeks.
Supercars confirmed during this year’s Darwin weekend the timeline for AVL transient dyno testing in the United States, with a set-up phase after the NTI Townsville 500 (July 5-7) then the first official phase after the Panasonic Air Conditioning Sydney SuperNight (July 19-21).
In any case, both Grove and Faux admitted tonight that their respective teams also have their own weaknesses to work on, with Dick Johnson Racing the best-performing Ford squad by some margin.
Grove said, “The weekend for us was tough. We had a lot of things thrown at us that we needed to get sorted. But I’m proud of how everyone pulled together.
“We’ve just got to get the car back in the window and get some one-lap speed and consistency. We need to start moving forward.
“We’re all working really hard and there is a lot to take away from the weekend.
“We’ve got a test day coming up and a few things to try. We just need to get to Townsville and put our best foot forward.”
While Grove duo Matt Payne and Richie Stanaway had very little to smile about, the former’s cause not helped by a pit lane start in Race 12 due to a fuel pressure drama and then a penalty for a driving infringement, WAU and Chaz Mostert could at least point to their fightback in Saturday’s Race 11.
Come Sunday, though, the two-time Bathurst 1000 winner qualified 20th and could only gain a net four spots in that encounter.
“We knew the super soft tyre was going to be a challenge and we just could not get any one-lap pace out of the car,” declared Faux.
“It’s simply not good enough for us, from a qualifying perspective.
“Chaz had an absolutely stunning drive on Saturday when we took four new tyres, but on Sunday everyone copied us and we didn’t get the same gain.
“We’re pretty happy with the race pace of the cars. We’ve got a rookie day with Ryan Wood so we’ll keep learning with him.”
Whether mere coincidence or not, it is notable in the context of the Ford release that Edwards raised the possibility that there is no engine disparity when he commented on the AVL transient dyno plan during the Saturday broadcast.
“It actually gives us fantastic information,” he told pit lane pundit Mark Larkham.
“What we’ve been doing for so long has got it to a really good place; you know, we are so close now.
“My yardstick for measuring that is, on a Friday morning, I have GM teams complaining to me and, on Friday afternoon, I have Ford teams complaining.
“So, it tells you you’re in the sweet spot when you’ve actually got both sides complaining.
“It doesn’t make my life easy when you’ve got both sides but, you know, we are so close now.
“And there’s half a chance we’re going to go here and make zero changes.
“But, what we can do on this is actually understand the characteristics of our engines a lot more.
“The RACE board are determined to use world’s best practice in everything we do here, and this is world’s best practice.
“We’re trying to tick every single box we can so we can never have parity conversations.
“It’s a lot quieter this year than it was last year – a little bit going on behind the scenes – but it is much quieter.
“But, this is world’s best practice, and RACE are determined to make sure that we tick every box we can.
“As I say, we might go there and do this study and go, ‘Well, they’re pretty bloody close, so we’re not going do anything.’
“But anyway, time will tell.”
Aerodynamic parity concerns have been put to bed with Supercars’ investment in historic off-season category wind tunnel testing.
Proactive centre of gravity testing was also undertaken early this season, which did in fact result in a tweak being made available for the Mustangs from the Hidden Valley event, as revealed by Speedcafe.
Ironically, it was Mustangs, particularly the two entered by WAU, which had the upper hand in the previous event of the season at Wanneroo.
Chevrolet homologation outfit Triple Eight Race Engineering now leads the teams’ championship by a massive 920 points but the next four in the standings are Ford squads.
