The New Zealand Touring Car Championship, which late last year amalgamated the SuperTourer and TLX machines, has ordered rear aero adjustments ahead of the fourth round at Ruapuna.
After undergoing an evaluation during tests at Hampton Downs, organisers were moved to deck out the TLX Class 1 cars with the SuperTourer rear wing.
The Class 1 TLX spec field of Nick Ross (Nissan Altima), Lance Hughes and Tom Alexander (Holden Commodores) and Scott Taylor and Jason Bargwanna (Toyota Camrys) will all go into the event sporting SuperTourer rear wing assemblies.
Category Manager Gary Lathrope says the aero adjustment is part of the category’s continual assessment of parity in the class following the two previously separately run touring car categories.
“We see this adjustment as a cost effective and simple step to bring the cars closer together,” Lathrope said.
“We will be making ongoing changes and will continue until we feel both specification cars are on a level pegging with each other.”
The decision follows an exercise where Andre Heimgartner put a TLX-spec Commodore, fitted with its standard wing before being replaced with the SuperTourer wing, through its paces at the north Waikato circuit.
According to the test the SuperTourer wing showed ‘substantial improvement under braking, corner and exit speeds and significantly improved the lap times of the TLX Holden by .8s’.