Triple Eight Race Engineering has racked up around 650km across its two Gen3 Red Bull Ampol Racing Camaros in their shakedowns at Queensland Raceway.
The Chevrolet homologation squad became the first to shake down multiple race cars, concurrently or otherwise, with primary drivers Shane van Gisbergen and Broc Feeney pounding around ‘The Paperclip’ today.
The 2022 champion and the last-start Supercars race winner briefly swapped vehicles during the day but, regardless, van Gisbergen and Car #97 logged around 115 laps, with Feeney and Car #88 in the mid-nineties.
With Queensland Raceway being 3.12km long, the running adds up to around 650km, after the sole Tickford Racing Ford Mustang which was rolled out at Winton on the day prior amassed 312km (104 laps of a 3.00km circuit) in the hands of Cameron Waters.
Van Gisbergen completed an 18-lap run but most of the mileage for he and Feeney was a string of three- to four-lap runs (including in and out laps), with one half-off spotted for the former at Turn 3 but no major incidents.
Both Cars #88 and #97 were used for ‘hot’ pit stop practice in the late-morning.
There were three cars present at the Ipswich venue, all Camaros built out of Triple Eight’s Banyo facilities, the other being the #31 PremiAir Racing entry to be driven by James Golding.
Car #31 did not appear on-track until just after 11:30 local time/12:30 AEDT due to an ECU-related issue but is estimated to have gone to log around 180 to 200km.
Golding completed most of the mileage, which included a seemingly harmless spin at Turn 3, but new team-mate Tim Slade contributed about 10 laps.
Triple Eight Team Manager Mark Dutton described his outfit’s day to Speedcafe.com as, “Awesome, fantastic; car ran pretty much faultlessly.
“You’re always chasing some little ergonomics and things like that, which is standard, and we’ll keep working towards things like that, but amazingly well for the culmination of a three-year project.”
Track activity went into a brief lull after a shower at around 10:30 local time, but drivers were unperturbed by late spits of rain.
The Triple Eight driver swap took place with around 90 minutes of the day remaining before the track closed at 17:00, with Dutton explaining that it was part of the shakedown process.
“[The purpose was] Just to see if there are any differences in sounds,” he said
“‘Is that a rattle, is that a feature? Is that a vibration or is that something they’ll have to get used to?’
“While there was nothing major, there are always little things that you try and listen to.
“So, that’s the benefit of putting each driver into a car swap. They get to experience the other one and go, ‘It’s in both cars, it must be normal,’ or the opposite, ‘There’s a difference, we need to investigate,’ so we’ll debrief and dig further into the car swap.”
Feeney told Speedcafe.com of the swap, “It was just a check, to see what it was like in the other car.
“We were just working through a couple of things in my car and we both wanted to swap and make sure it felt the same. It was all good.
“It was the first time running the cars and we don’t normally swap on a normal test day, but also we normally have our co-drivers as well to get a second opinion.
“I just wanted Shane to check something with my car and he was out of his car so I jumped in his.”
Asked if #97 and #88 were significantly different, Feeney said, “Nah, it was all good.”
Shakedowns are unlimited mileage for the introduction of Gen3 instead of the usual 60km for new chassis.
Triple Eight is set to return to Queensland Raceway for what will thus officially be its first test day on Tuesday.
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