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In-car anti-roll bar adjustors were a staple of the category from the early days of the V8 formula, prior to being left out of the control Gen3 package when it debuted in 2023.
Talk that it was just a temporary measure amid a rush to finish the cars and would eventually be re-introduced has gone cold.
Larkham opined on the TV broadcast following Saturday’s race at the Boost Mobile Gold Coast 500 that a rethink of the policy is now required.
He noted the plight of Grove Racing’s Richie Stanaway, who appeared powerless to defend his position from those behind as he struggled with a bad car balance in the opening stint.
“I don’t like the fact that we’ve taken the anti-roll bars out of these cars. It’s a tool that we used forever,” said Larkham.
“I was thinking of Stanaway, and I just said to him, ‘in that first 10 laps when you were battling with your tyres, would you have liked to have the anti-roll bar adjustors in your car?’.
“He said, ‘my oath I would’.
“When your rear tyre goes away you can pull your rear bar back a little bit, bring your front bar up a little bit, and it puts its power down a little bit nicer, saves the tyre.
“It brings more people into play. I just think ‘Supercars, we need to have a bit of a rethink about that’. I think it would be a good thing for racing to have that.”
Anti-roll bar stiffness is only able to be adjusted on the Gen3 cars during pitstops.
It was a tuning tool used in this month’s Bathurst 1000 amid a tense battle between Brodie Kostecki and Broc Feeney across the closing stints.
An anti-roll bar adjustment in Kostecki’s final pitstop appeared to change the momentum of the race, allowing the Erebus Camaro to stave off what had previously been a significant Feeney threat.
Asked in the wake of that battle whether he thinks the in-car adjustors should be re-introduced, Kostecki argued that the racing is better without them.
“I think if you put adjustable roll bars in it, everyone’s going to end up with the same exact balance, because you can fix it during the race,” he said.
“I think what we saw [during the Bathurst 1000] was one car was better halfway through the day, and then another one come to life.
“Whereas if we had adjustable roll bars, it probably would have been really boring towards the end, because I just would have been able to fix my car in the cockpit and same with Broc.”
The Boost Mobile 500 concludes today with qualifying, a Top 10 Shootout and the 250km Race 22 of the season.
