By Bruce Newton
Release date: July 13, 2021
The Gen3 supercar will look even more like a street car than originally planned.
Supercars has confirmed that refining the shape of the new Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang is a major reason the test debut of the first prototypes has been postponed from August to October.
Other reasons are a delay in the procurement of important parts from foreign suppliers, as we report here.
The planned racing debut in August 2022 at Sydney Motorsport Park will not be affected by the test start in October.
A strong visual connection to the road vehicles was an important part of the Gen3 program when it was first unveiled in 2019 after the Gen2 Ford Mustang received mixed reactions due to its hunchbacked appearance.
“You will not confuse which car is which,” promised Supercars motorsport director Adrian Burgess. “You will see how many of the styling elements you see on the road car transform into the racing car.”
The revised Gen3 look also goes hand in hand with a drastic reduction in aerodynamic downforce from around 400 kg to 100 kg.
Supercars Motorsport Director Adrian Burgess confirmed that the styling changes were made in consultation with Ford and General Motors, which include Chevrolet.
“In certain parts of this process, in dialogue with the manufacturers themselves, we shifted our own goals in order to enable the manufacturers to introduce more road vehicle DNA.
“Our aero program is an example of this. We changed our original thought a few months ago to give them more street car DNA because we believe it will make the car look better.
“And that actually gave the system more time.
“At the time we said, ‘Is this the right thing?’ and we categorically said yes.
“It’s a constantly evolving job and we work very closely with both manufacturers and are currently satisfied with the topicality that we offer them.”
Burgess didn’t go into the details of the changes, but explained the process that supercars and manufacturers had used to revise the specification, and thus the look of the cars.
“When you start an aero program, give some guidelines to manufacturers; the height of certain body parts, the clearances, wheel arch openings.
“They give them instructions on what we think the set of rules should look like. Then these guys come back and say, “Well this is the car we’re looking at, we’d like to add a little bit of styling to this area that is closer to the street car than our current cars”.
“We sit with them, talk to them and say, ‘Yeah, we need to change our guidelines to get more street car styling and DNA into our race car.’
“We moved our initial guidelines to include more street vehicle styling. Is that important? Of course it is. It’s important to the customer and it’s important to the manufacturer.
“They want these cars to get as close to the road car as possible. We try to be very inclusive. “
For more current Supercars news, see the latest issue of Auto Action. Also follow us on social media Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or our weekly email newsletter for the latest updates between editions.
Find automatic action
