Davison’s regular data man takes on race engineer duties for car #17 in place of Richard Harris, who is unavailable due to a family wedding.
Mutsaerts’s debut in the main role comes at a particularly challenging event for race engineers, given the short nature of the Symmons Plains circuit.
“It’s not optimal, there’s no sugar-coating that, but we’ll just do the best we can,” Davison told Speedcafe.
“It’s a good opportunity for Caleb. At the end of the day there’s being a good engineer and then there’s having the experience of thinking on the fly and the communication.
“People don’t understand how much those engineers have got going on in short sessions, there’s a lot to manage.
“Between making (setup) decisions, managing the radio, managing the timing of the runs and getting out at the right time for a draft, not missing the flag…
“There’s a lot that experience counts for. It’ll be a good chance for him to actually experience all of that.”
The team is doing its best to support Mutsaerts through the weekend.
“Rich is on the phone, he’s been a big part of the preparation to get here with the car and working with Perry (Kapper, race engineer for Anton De Pasquale),” Davison added.
“We’ve got (chief engineer) Mark Fenning here this weekend, which is good, he’s a very experienced head as well, I’m sure he’ll be on close guard, and my experience, I have to be on it as well.
“We’ll just have to navigate the challenges as they come.”
Rolling out strongly in first practice on Friday is the first major box to tick for all teams and will likely have a big bearing on how DJR’s weekend unfolds.
“Weather pending, hopefully we’ve got something that’s OK out of the gate and we can keep things relatively simple,” Davison said.
“There has been a lot of preparation into the weekend as to how we want to run the cars and hopefully we can make sense of it in practice and there’s only some small changes.
“We know the two cars are relatively similar but there’s a couple of key differences and we can shift one car to the other (setup) pretty easily.
“We’ve tried to prepare and make life as easy as possible for the engineer, but famous last words.
“We’ve tried a lot of times this year to roll out fast and we haven’t and there’s been kitchen sinks going at it over night, that’s just the nature of Gen3.
“But we’re getting better at that and hopefully we’ve got something reasonably close out of the gate and can make life easy for Caleb.”
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