The Toyotas made a low-key start to the marque’s long-awaited Supercars entry as they faced their Ford and Chevrolet rivals for the first time.
Walkinshaw’s Chaz Mostert ended the four hours of Wednesday running on Sydney’s Druitt layout as the highest placed Supra driver on the timesheets in 16th of the 24 cars.
The Supras were also towards the bottom of the laps completed tally – a fact at least partially explained by their program for the day.
“It’s the first time that we were able to run five cars consecutively, which has been good, so a lot of data gathered,” Walkinshaw team principal Carl Faux told Speedcafe.
“Predominantly, we were doing lots of work on ‘drop and goes’, pit lane transitions and starts. Being able to do different settings across the different drivers and different cars has been good data gathering.
“The circumstances that we’ve got now, where we’ve got this afternoon to look at this morning and tomorrow morning to make any adjustments that we might need going into the evening’s test session will be good.”
Those comments were largely echoed by Brad Jones, whose cars ended the session in three of the last four places in the order.
An electrical gremlin that limited Andre Heimgartner to just 28 laps was the only technical issue reported by either team.
“We did a lot of things that we haven’t done with the Toyotas that we needed to do,” said Jones.
“Definitely not where I’d like to be with times, but we’ll see what happens tomorrow night when we run on the full track.
“It started to get a bit hot today by the time we got going. I feel like we’ve got a bit of work to do, but certainly a good start to the weekend for us.”
Faux insisted that he “didn’t even look at the timing” on a day where the lack of policing of track limits on the Druitt circuit’s link road clouded the already questionable value of comparisons.
Homologation team Walkinshaw ran a 5000km testing program with its prototype Supra ahead of Sydney, while BJR was limited to a single shakedown last Wednesday.
Arguably, having all five cars on track marked a win in itself for the two squads following a last-minute push that included getting spare engines to the circuit.
“There’s no delusion from anyone, we’ve got lots of learning to do. The other guys are in their fourth year, right? And they had a good year of testing beforehand,” added Faux.
“We’ve got an engine that has broken new ground around the world, it’s completely different to what’s been done before, and we can’t go and pick things off the shelf like the others can.
“So it’s a huge effort to get there and to be able to do that with Toyota and a customer team coming in like we have.”
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