Under the bonnet of the Gen3 Ford Mustang prototype. Pic: Supplied
SUPERCARS is wary that the move to randomly allocated engines will not necessarily eliminate claims of uneven equipment by teams and drivers.
From next year, all powerplants will be built by either Herrod Performance Engines (Ford) or KRE Race Engines (Chevrolet).
“Supercars are going to randomly pick the engines, we’ll allocate them to the teams and away they go,” the championship’s head of motorsport, Adrian Burgess, explained.
“There won’t be anyone accusing either of the homologation teams favoring their factory team.
“So we need to build all of these engines, make sure they’re all within a tolerance that we’re comfortable with, and then we’ll randomly select where they go up and down the pitlane.”
That’s not to say engine parity, from unit to unit, will be totally accepted by all.
“If they feel that their engine has lost power or whatever, they’ll talk with their engine builder and they’ll agree or disagree whether that’s the case and then they’ll send that back to Supercars for us to check on our dyno, ” Burgess said.
“Our dyno is the ruler, they all come across our dyno, but that will be the first discussion, between those two guys and then it will come back to Supercars.”
The Gen3 prototypes in Adelaide. Pic: Nathan Wong
Regardless, Burgess is confident that degradation will be minimized in the Gen3 era.
“One of the good things we’ve done is the new relationship with Ryco and the air filter,” he said.
“Historically in these cars, the engine degradation comes from the valve seat wear and the damage by all the sand and dirt and shit that’s ingested into the engine. That’s where you lose your power.
“With the new filtration system we’ve got, the engines that we have opened up are incredibly clean and consistent and we haven’t seen any degradation across a good period of kilometers achieved.
“But again, we don’t just want to go to the bank and say ‘that’s life’ because we have done it on two or three engines, this is going to be a rolling thing that we measure throughout the year.
“We will pluck engines randomly and just check what their degradation is and give them back, because this is a learning process for the engine builders and for the category as we go forward.
“But the signs are there, both the engines have been to America on their AVL dynos, it’s encouraging, but again you need more sample sizes than just the prototypes.”
