Erebus Motorsport CEO Barry Ryan has weighed in on the ongoing Supercars parity review which is set to lead to improvements to the Ford Mustang by the next event.
Erebus enjoys a one-two in the drivers’ championship and while its Coca-Cola Camaros may have been unusually absent from the podium last time out at Hidden Valley, Chevrolet teams continued their collective dominance of the first season of Gen3.
Camaros swept the three race wins and took eight of a possible nine podium finishes in Darwin, although it may have been a different story had the Mustang of Cameron Waters, who set the two fastest laps of the weekend on his way to pole position for Race 13, not caught fire while leading that encounter.
However, with the scoreline now reading 14 Camaro wins to the Mustang’s one in 2023, and an all-Camaro top nine in Race 14, there was an outcry from the Ford camp at the conclusion of proceedings in the Top End.
In the following days, Supercars would announce an official parity review, the outcome of which is still not known.
However, off the back of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) work and race track validation, it is highly likely that there will be some tweak to the rear end bodywork of the Mustang ahead of next weekend’s NTI Townsville 500.
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Ryan hopes that whatever is decided off the back of the review, it puts a full stop on the parity issue.
“Adrian Burgess and his Supercars technical team deserve a lot of credit for the Gen3 project!!” he wrote in a message to media.
“Forgetting why or how GM teams have won the majority of races in 2023, the qualifying and racing has been closer than ever!!
“Close racing is exactly what Gen3 was meant to be, correct??
“We all want Ford to win races ‘politically’ as that is what makes everyone happy, but no team should be handed a pole position or race win for any reason apart from being the best on a given day.
“Hopefully Townsville gives the Ford teams the changes they think they deserve and we all live happily ever after and the racing becomes even closer and harder, if that is at all possible.”
While Mustangs have ‘won’ only once so far this year, that being Race 1 from which Triple Eight Race Engineering was disqualified out of a one-two, they have been more competitive in qualifying and shown speed during races.
Indeed, the fastest race laps were set by Mustangs at Wanneroo and Symmons Plains, and Waters looked competitive until his unfortunate fire at Hidden Valley.
Furthermore, the field spread was less than seven tenths of a second in each of the single-part Sunday qualifying sessions at Darwin, where the lap is (slightly) longer than a minute.
Nevertheless, Ford figures have argued, privately and publicly, that the Mustang works its tyres harder, and has to be driven on edge to be competitive, leaving little margin for error.
Still, with such small gaps on the timesheets, Chevrolet figures have queried whether the alleged disparity is genuine, and it has been tipped that what changes might be made to the Mustang will be so minor as to possibly be imperceptible to the untrained eye.
With Dick Johnson Racing having run at Queensland Raceway yesterday, it is likely that it, its counterpart homologation team Triple Eight, and Supercars will still be examining data/feedback, and hence no tweaks will be confirmed until early next week.
However, there is tipped to be time to implement those changes before practice takes place in Townsville on Friday, July 7.
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