A new Supercars season is now just days away, so we ask who you think will win the drivers’ championship, in this week’s Pirtek Poll.
The 2023 Repco Supercars Championship promises more intrigue than ever, thanks to the introduction of the Gen3 Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang.
While there is stability in all of the key driver/team/engineer combinations from 2022, an all but entirely new specification of race car promises to shake up the pecking order.
On top of all of that, the rapid-fire nature of the 2023 pre-season and a shifting parity landscape create even more uncertainty about the true form guide.
What we do know is that every team in the field has some legitimate reason to suggest it will be stronger this year than it was in the last.
Of course, the focus will certainly be on Triple Eight Race Engineering, which dominated last year’s teams’ championship and drivers’ championship, courtesy of Shane van Gisbergen.
Now a three-time champion, van Gisbergen won a record 21 races last year, and has proven himself to be a highly adaptable steerer.
That said, there are also big question marks surrounding the New Zealander.
It would be foolish at this point to suggest that he will struggle in absolute terms, but his silence on the Gen3 car itself during the year to date has been notable, and not even he could give much of an explanation as to why he was on “struggle street” at last month’s Bathurst 12 Hour.
Team-mate Broc Feeney, on the other hand, was a shock front row qualifier in the Supercheap Auto Mercedes-AMG, and is the most recent race winner in Supercars after a breakthrough triumph in his Red Bull Ampol Racing entry at Adelaide last December.
At Dick Johnson Racing, Will Davison will be looking to build on a 2022 campaign which proved that the veteran has still got it, while Anton De Pasquale can reasonably claim that he was better than the luck which was dealt his way.
Then there is Tickford Racing, where Cameron Waters has been the biggest thorn in van Gisbergen’s/Triple Eight’s side for the past two years.
He is likely to lead the Campbellfield-based team’s charge again in 2023, and his aggressive style could play well with race cars which are far more raw than their Gen2 predecessors.
Walkinshaw Andretti United has made the bombshell switch from General Motors to Ford, a sign that it will do whatever it takes in its quest to return to glory days the likes of which it enjoyed in the late-1990s and early-2000s.
Continuing along the pit lane, and Grove Racing’s biggest coup in recent months has been an enduro driver, but Garth Tander is always an asset and it had already been building a stacked engineering brains trust.
At Erebus Motorsport, Barry Ryan has been bullish about the Camaros which his crew has built, while Team 18 has taken the bold step of going its own way in 2023 rather than remaining aligned with Triple Eight.
Brad Jones Racing was fastest in the official pre-season test and while Brad Jones himself made the not unreasonable assertion that there was not so much to glean from the timesheets, it is worth noting just how the Albury-based team bolted out of the blocks when the Car of the Future era began in 2013, and how Andre Heimgartner finished the 2022 campaign.
Matt Stone Racing has been boosted by the arrival of veteran engineer Paul Forgie and, while PremiAir Racing has a new driver on the books in Tim Slade, it can start to settle after a whirlwind debut season last year, including having its Team Principal onboard from Event 1 this time around.
The Blanchard Racing Team can, of course, be discounted as a teams’ championship hope given it is a single entry, but that Mustang was the first Gen3 race car onto the track, a big coup for the small outfit.
So, who do you think will win this year’s Supercars drivers’ championship? Cast your vote in this week’s Pirtek Poll.
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