Team 18 questions Supercars centre of gravity test

Recent COG testing across the Camaro, the Ford Mustang and the new Toyota Supra resulted in Supercars instructing Chevrolet teams to shift 4.4 kilograms of ballast to the roll cage above the passenger seat.

While previous COG testing involved a spread of cars, Supercars opted for what motorsport boss Tim Edwards labelled a more “clinical” approach with just one car from each make.

Those cars were all fitted with new bodywork to account for potential anomalies in panel weights.

While Supercars sees the new testing process as a step forward, Team 18 boss – and former Supercars Head of Motorsport – Adrian Burgess is not convinced.

Speaking about the COG change he accepted that the Camaros will have to carry the ballast this weekend in Sydney, but admitted he wants to see more testing before having confidence in the data.

“It’s a relatively small change, but you’d rather have no change,” said Burgess.

“It’s not the process that we’ve taken in the past, where we’ve taken more cars and had a broader sample. I’ve had conversations with Supercars around things we’d like to see.

“The two other cars, I believe, were real race cars, where our car we presented was the wind tunnel car, we weren’t really thinking about a COG test when we were preparing it for the wind tunnel, so there’s a few things that we would like checked.

“We would like the process to be expanded to capture more of what we’re actually racing. It’s easy to present a car with brand new bodywork, all on the minimum weight limit, but that’s not really how the teams are competing.

“There’s people out there with front bars that are five, six, seven, eight kilos over the minimum. We need to go through the process of evaluating whether out minimum panels weights are correct for cars that are entering their fourth year of racing, compared to a brand new car [with] brand new bodywork.

“There are a few challenges we need to refine before I’ve got more confidence that the number is the real number.

“But we are here for the long game. We acknowledge our role, we’re not going to kick up and make a big stink about it.

“We put the weight on the roll hoop for practice yesterday and we’re going to get on with our job, which is going racing.”

The COG testing took place at Bathurst last weekend using the three cars that had undertaken parity evaluation running at Mount Panorama.