Dick Johnson Racing boss Ryan Story flagged the potential for a Mountain Panorama-specific motor late last year after the Ford runners struggled in the October classic.
Story argued the Mustang package is now such that it can win the championship but not the Great Race, highlighting a theory that the Coyote is being impacted by the track’s elevation.
Supercars has since embarked on a study regarding how barometric pressure impacts engine performance, with an upgrade of category engine man Craig Hasted’s dyno required.
“A lot of work has been done on that,” Supercars motorsport manager Tim Edwards told Speedcafe of the barometric pressure testing.
“There’s very few places in the world you can go and actually test that, so it’s quite a complicated thing to achieve, but we are working on it.
“We’ve done half the program, we’ve figured out the inlet side of it, but to do it properly you need the pressure applied to both sides, so it’s the exhaust side that we’re still working on.
“We don’t believe it’s worth doing half a study because you might get a different result when you actually do the exhaust side as well.”
Edwards indicated the category will act if a discrepancy is detected, opening the door for a Bathurst-specific engine specification for the Ford runners.
“If, and that’s a big if, we identified there was an issue, of course it would be something we’d need to get on top of and I don’t think there’d be anybody who would disagree with that,” he said.
“If you’ve done the test and it’s factual you just need to deal with it. But before we can have that conversation, you need to do the test and get some facts.
“There’s some opinions that it might be the case, they might be right, they might be wrong, what we’ve got to find out is actually doing the test.”
Edwards affirmed that the target is to have the process completed in time for this year’s Great Race.
“We thought we’d have it done by now, but there’s always a hundred other things to do and until you go into it, you realise, ‘oh, that’s not as easy as we thought it was going to be’,” he said.
“We’re fortunate that Craig [Hasted] has leant on a few contacts overseas and he’s been able to get some insight into how others have achieved it and it’s given us some really good direction.
“It’s great that Craig has those contacts that he can actually get that information.”
The performance of the Ford engine was again a talking point last weekend at Albert Park, where Chevrolet Camaros locked out the podium in all three races contested.
It came just weeks after Tickford Racing’s Cam Waters utterly dominated the opening round of the season at Sydney Motorsport Park.
Global Ford Performance boss Mark Rushbrook was at the Melbourne event and said the apparent lack of competitiveness of the Mustang was discussed with Supercars.
“We don’t want the advantage swinging from one brand to the other, depending on the track that you go to,” Rushbrook said.
“So I think that is part of the continued learning, where we need to work together with a series to look at the data, to take the feedback from the drivers and try to understand.
“What is different from Sydney to here? Is it ambient temperatures? Is it going over kerbs? What is it that’s different, and how do we close that gap?
“Because while we enjoyed the results at Sydney, we don’t want it to be that way, that it just swings [and] we know going to this track that Chevy is going to be the dominant car, or going to this particular track, that Ford is going to be the dominant car.
“That’s not good for the sport, that’s not good for anybody.”
Supercars’ engine parity program included a round of AVL dyno testing in the United States midway through 2024.
A planned return later this year to homologate the Toyota for 2026 will also include the Ford and GM engines.
The category is heavily involved in the development of the Toyota motor, which like the Ford Coyote is a quad-cam V8.
