As flagged earlier this week, Team 18 top brass visited the GM Charlotte Technical Centre in North Carolina as well as several Chevrolet-affiliated race teams.
The Supercars squad will take the reins from Triple Eight Race Engineering as the factory Chevrolet team from 2026 in what is a watershed moment for the Melbourne outfit.
“Fantastic trip to GM Technical Centre in Charlotte,” said Burgess.
“Eric Warren (General Motors vice president, global motorsports competition) and his team made us really welcome the whole time we were there.
“Spent a couple of days just visiting all the departments, talking to all the people, starting to build some relationships, and just looking at all the cool things they’re doing with their global motorsport program.”
Burgess was joined by four technical director Geoff Slater, performance engineer Som Sharma, as well as race engineers Richard Hollway and Andrew Donnelly.
Among the stops were NASCAR teams Hendrick Motorsports, Trackhouse Racing, and Richard Childress Racing.
They also visited IMSA SportsCar team Action Express Racing, who race a Cadillac Hypercar in the GTP class.
The team principal said the quest was valuable to understand General Motors’ worldwide motorsport push.
“The effort that they’re putting in globally now into motorsport is second to none and it was just nice and very interesting to see some of that,” said Burgess.
“That was really interesting to see how they do things as well,” he said of the NASCAR teams.
“Just recently, towards the end of this week, we went and saw the Cadillac at Action Express and spent the day with Pratt and Miller and the GT3 Corvette up at Virginia International Raceway for their event this weekend.
“All in all, it’s been an amazing trip, very insightful, lots of good little nuggets to take away from it and more importantly, just meeting and greeting the people who work there at the tech centre and just stingart to build some relationships.
“There are no silver bullets in this game, but there’s certainly the stimulation it’s given all my engineers and myself; little areas where we can do things nicer or better. It’s been really interesting. Great trip.
“We leave tomorrow to come back to Australia and get our head down and focus on Tailem Bend and Bathurst coming up. So exciting time and very thankful to the GM family for inviting us over.”
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