The Gen3 Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang engines are matched “incredibly close” according to Supercars’ Head of Motorsport, Adrian Burgess.
A new era is fast approaching for the sport with the introduction of the Gen3 ruleset at next year’s season-opening Newcastle 500 from March 10-12.
While pre-season testing will take place in late January, the Supercars fraternity is set for a busy off-season as the new-car builds reach the most critical phase.
Part of that is the distribution of engines to teams, most of which have already arrived in Australia from the United States.
Each production motor will be put together by the respective engine builders and also run on a dyno by Supercars’ technical department.
Following that, each Ford outfit will be randomly distributed a 5.4-litre Coyote, with the same process applying to the Camaro teams who will field a 5.7-litre General Motors powerplant.
As Speedcafe.com reported in July, the category reached parity with both engines early in the project.
However, Burgess has suggested further good signs following durability testing of the prototypes.
“The numbers we’ve got these engines to brand-to-brand are incredibly close,” he said.
“But I can’t just rely on the prototype engine from each side, I need to see production engines, five-to-10 of each of these engines, because there’s only two engine builders.
“Supercars are going to randomly pick engines and allocate them to the teams and away they go.
“There won’t be any accusing either of the two homologation teams favouring their factory team.”
After 30 years of 5.0L V8s, Gen3 sees different engine displacements between the Camaro and Mustang.
Burgess shed further light on technical specifications of the new cars.
“[Gen3 is] roughly 50 horsepower less [than Gen2] but the way we measure it on the dyno we’ve changed,” he explained.
“That’s because the nature of the engines, there’s a lot more power low down, so we’ve broadened our AEP [Accumulated Engine Power] number.
“That number sounds a lot bigger than the current number, but in effect, it’s 50 horsepower less, but we’re capturing it over a much wider range.
“You need to with the different architecture of the two engines we’ve got and the car is a lot lighter.
“We’re [about] 110kg-120kg lighter with the two prototypes, but there’s still a few things [missing] in the prototypes — we haven’t got the refuelling valve in there.
“There’s a few bits that we’re finishing off for the production car and I need the production car weights before we can publish…and I need a half a dozen cars made to make sure the number is a genuine number across the whole field.”
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