The original idea was to run that car as a third entry at a sprint round and the two enduros, with Cam Crick closely linked to the project.
Those plans were ultimately sidelined, though, with Crick joining Cam Hill for the enduros while the new chassis has been given to Nick Percat, with his current car to become a spare.
Speaking on the latest episode of The Hard Card with Authentic Collectables, team owner Matt Stone talked through the decision to dump the wildcard plan.
According to Stone it was a selfish decision based on not wanting to compromise MSR’s chances with its primary entries at the resource-heavy long-distance races.
“Look, we’re still very passionate about doing a wildcard,” said Stone.
“We’ve always been a real rookie driver team, and we’re competing at a level in the main game where we don’t want to reset our driver lin-eup to rookies every few years. We’re quite happy with the two guys we’ve got, and we want to keep building that.
“But we still do have an interest in running rookies and helping them graduate into supercars. So a wildcard is very good for that.
“Our reason for parking it comes down to, I guess, selfishness of our main game program.
“You know, Sandown and Bathurst are the two biggest races of the year, and we just couldn’t afford the distraction of running a third car and spreading our resources too thin.
“We would really like to run wildcards at sprint rounds because they’re not as in-depth as the enduros. You know, you could run a wildcard without compromising our main effort.
“However, we’re not currently resourced enough to run a third car at Sandown and Bathurst without it being a stretch. And, you know, we’d rather do one thing well than two things poorly.”
Stone reiterated his point by calling on Supercars to change the wildcard rules to allow multiple sprint rounds.
“Hopefully in the future the rules are changed a little bit into the sense of how they used to be, where you could do multiple sprint round wildcards,” he said.
“And if we could do that, we 100 percent would lock in to do two or three next year.
“It’s just a very hard justification to build up the infrastructure and the staff to just do one round, which is what we thought about doing this year. And then to make that viable, we were going to do one sprint round plus the two enduros.
“But ultimately, it was just going to be a distraction at Bathurst. And we go on to Bathurst with the intention of trying to win it. So we don’t want any distractions.”
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