Supercars has summoned a car from each manufacturer for the testing, which will take place across Queensland Raceway and Bathurst.
Running is scheduled for the Ipswich venue on February 9 and 10 before the cars head to Mount Panorama for sessions during that weekend’s Bathurst 12 Hour event.
That leads directly into Sydney 500 week, which includes a full-field pre-season test at Sydney Motorsport Park on Wednesday, February 18, and the weekend’s race meeting.
The track outings will follow December’s aerodynamic testing at the Windshear wind tunnel in the United States and dyno-based engine evaluations that are currently taking place in Brisbane.
“The QR testing and the [Bathurst] 12 Hour are further data points for us to assess where we’re at,” Supercars’ motorsport boss Tim Edwards told Speedcafe.
Supercars is handling pre-season dyno testing locally through its engine partner Cragsted, rather than returning to the AVL facility in the US that it last used midway through 2024.
The category has flagged plans to visit an AVL dyno in Austria at some point later in the year.
“We’ve got a plan that we’re working through with the three HTs (homologation teams) using all the tools we’ve got at our disposal,” said Edwards.
“Everyone is comfortable that we’ll tick off the key parameters we’ll need to tick off.”
There is significant intrigue over the current performance of the 5.2-litre version of Toyota’s 2UR-GSE V8 that has been developed in conjunction with UK firm Swindon for use in the championship.
Ford rival Brodie Kostecki claimed earlier this week that the engine is “quite far behind”, predicting grim results for the new player in the first part of the season.
Edwards confirmed a second iteration of the engine is now up and running on the Cragsted dyno, although declined to share details of any specification changes.
“The way we’re describing it is it’s the production version, and we’ve got more than one sitting at Cragsted,” he said.
“You always build prototype engines and then as you hone in on the final product, you produce a production version.”
Asked of his confidence of having engine parity from the start of the season, Edwards noted the quad-cam nature of the Toyota makes it easily tuneable.
“It’s not like the [pushrod] GM where once you’ve got a camshaft in it’s hard coded, the only tool you’re left to play with is the restrictor,” he said.
“We’re fortunate the Toyota is like the Ford and we can move the camshafts around as we need to achieve the same power curve as the other two.
“It’ll be a combination of moving the cams, the normal calibration work and the restrictor size.”
The category intends to start the season without any shiftcut offset across the three brands – a tool it used as recently as last year when trying to balance the Ford and GM.
Supercars will reintroduce a lap time based parity review trigger this year, providing a mathematical framework to determine whether in-season changes are required.
Discussion about this post