Matt Stone Racing is comfortable with the task at hand in assembling its own Gen3 Supercars ahead of the 2023 season.
While the chassis fabrication of the team’s three Chevrolet Camaros will be completed by PACE Innovations, MSR is finalising the assembly of its cars in-house.
That includes fabricating many of the control parts, before assembling that componentry with the engine, bodywork, and more, on the delivered chassis.
MSR has a technical alliance with Triple Eight Race Engineering, who will offer assistance on the project.
Team boss, Matt Stone, did not shy away from the undertaking at hand in what will be the Yatala-based operation’s first new-car Supercars Championship build.
“As a project, it’s a decent undertaking,” Stone told Speedcafe.com.
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“But thankfully, the core of the work is being done by Supercars and the design platform that they’ve put behind it with Triple Eight and DJR as a homologation teams, and doing a core part of the design.
“So really, the design work and the manufacturing work, a lot of that is taken care of as part of the platform and for us, it’s just about managing production and assembly.”
Despite being one of the championship’s smaller teams, MSR is equipped with resources to manufacture Gen3’s many control parts in-house.
The team started out of a one-car Dunlop Super2 Series squad in 2011 before making the step up to the main game in 2018, and has previously been involved in ground-up Touring Car Masters builds.
Stone confessed the Gen3 assembly project is “simpler” than it may seem.
“There are some components which are control spec, so the teams can make them however, and wherever they like, but they’ve got to be made to that spec,” he added.
“And then there are other aspects of it that are control parts and control suppliers.
“So you have to purchase them from that particular supplier, or you have to purchase that particular part number.
“There are a few aspects of it, but from a race team’s point of view, once we get through the initial new concept part of it, it’s a lot simpler than the current cars.
“[That’s] because there are not as many freedoms permitted where teams would have to go out and design and implement their own componentry.
“That componentry is more or less all fixed. And we’ve just got to work on the production and installation of it.
“We haven’t built a new Supercar to date,” added Stone.
“Certainly, we’ve built other cars, we’ve managed projects much similar, even larger than this one internally.
“We’ve got a wealth of experience within the team, including myself, with people that have been involved in this sort of undertaking in Supercars before.
“So with all those resources and the fact that we can lean on our technical alliance with Triple Eight, we’re confident in the internal build process.”
The Gen3 Camaro and Ford Mustang prototypes were on track at Queensland Raceway on Thursday for a shakedown, the latest outing for the project.
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