That’s the word from Chevrolet Racing bosses following news it has selected the Charlie Schwerkolt-owned squad as Triple Eight’s successor.
GM moved relatively swiftly to appoint a new HT following January’s announcement that Triple Eight will be moving to Ford in 2026.
While Triple Eight will continue to race its Camaros through until the end of this season, its time as the HT is set to come to an early end.
“There’ll be a progressive handover from Triple Eight, but we’re still working our way through the timing of that,” explained GM Racing boss Chris Payne.
“It’s likely to be from July onwards.”
Team 18’s role in the GM structure will be somewhat different to that played by Triple Eight to date.
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GM has poached Triple Eight technical director Jeromy Moore to work directly for its organisation and says it will take responsibility for the performance of its engine and body.
GM VP of competition Eric Warren described Team 18’s position as that of a conduit between it and Supercars.
“Whether it’s parts or testing or things like that, you need to have a conduit to really work through,” he said.
“That’s really what we’re looking towards. But our goal is to support all of our teams, and really all of our teams support the homologation activities through Team 18.
“But depending upon what it is, if it’s a new part design, we certainly can from designers to manufacturing to all those things, kind of play a support role.”
The handover of GM HT duties from Triple Eight to Team 18 will leave the former clear to take up work for the Blue Oval.
Ford wants Triple Eight to lead the way on any homologation duties relating to 2026, which could include the development of a Dark Horse model update to its current S650 race cars.
Schwerkolt, though, does not expect the Camaro to join the new Toyota Supra and, potentially, the Mustang for Supercars’ next round of wind tunnel testing later this year.
“We don’t think so at this stage,” he said.
“Obviously, you know, with Supercars, we’ve got to make sure that the Toyota is measured up to what the Camaro is, that the Camaro should be the baseline and the Toyota has got to meet our expectations.
“Obviously people will be going, Jeromy [Moore] and Adrian [Burgess] and all that sort of stuff, and the US [GM] will be heavily involved to go through the whole program.
“But at this stage, I don’t know [if we’ll send a car]. We’ll find out as we go.”
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