Supercars Head of Motorsport Adrian Burgess says there is parity in the Gen3 race cars even if there remains an “anomaly” in the Ford engine.
Chevrolet drivers continued their collective dominance of the season thus far at the Bosch Power Tools Perth SuperSprint, winning all three races and filling seven of the nine podium places.
That outcome came despite a new engine map being installed for the Mustangs at Wanneroo Raceway, although that was largely intended to address driveability, rather than the issue of performance in fourth, fifth, and sixth gear.
Asked by Speedcafe and the Parked Up Plus podcast if there is parity between the Camaro and Mustang, Burgess replied, “I think so, yes.
“There’s still an engine anomaly. Is it affecting the show? You can argue one way or the other; depends who you ask. I don’t think it is.
“Do we want to remove that anomaly? Of course we do, and that’s what we’re working towards doing.
“But, at the moment, for me, the racing has been fantastic – they are extremely, extremely close – but unless you’re the bloke stood on the top step every week, you’re going to say, ‘No, we need to fix something.’”
Burgess also went into detail on the engine map change ahead of the Perth event.
“The nuts and bolts of what they did is, they identified that, when they’re off-throttle, their camshafts weren’t stable, they were moving around,” he explained.
“It wasn’t like a linear position that they’re in, so they’re moving around, and they wanted to stabilise, just put the cams in a more stable position when they’re off throttle, so they did that.
“People think that’s their engine braking. It hasn’t really affected their engine braking, but it’s just made the engine, in that phase, a lot more consistent and dependable for the driver.
“Equally, that, on the upside, when you then go and pick up the throttle, it’s just made the response a little bit cleaner, a little bit crisper, a little bit more precise, probably easier for the driver to modulate the throttle.”
However, with top end speed still a concern, a discrepancy in shift cut remains between the two engines.
The Mustang’s has been 50ms and the Camaro’s 105ms since the start of the season, although an experiment was undertaken at Wanneroo with some Mustangs running a 30ms cut.
On that matter, Burgess said, “There’s been a piece of work that’s been going on all year.
“They’ve got an anomaly post-shift, so their complaints around lack of performance in fourth gear, fifth gear, sixth gear primarily come from the what the engine does after the shift.
“So there has been a shift cut introduced to try and bring that discrepancy together – that obviously affects their end of straight speed – so that’s how we’ve been managing it at the moment.
“I think when you look at their end of straight speeds this weekend, the cars are stupidly close.
“So, the mechanism we’ve put in place to try and prioritise that or manage that while they go and hunt for the real reason why their engine has this anomaly post shift, that’s how we’re managing it, and that’s how we’re paritising it.
“I think you need to speak to Ford as to what the initial issue is, but what we’ve put in place to manage that has been working very well.”
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