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PremiAir Racing Team Principal Matty Cook has told Speedcafe.com that he expects the teams’ collaboration in the initial runs of the new Gen3 Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang to end once the Supercars field arrives at the first round in Newcastle next month.
“To be honest, there’s a there’s a big group chat going where everyone’s been very forthcoming with information, but I want to say in Newcastle that chat ends,” Cook told Speedcafe.com.
The Gold Coast team is set to shake down the second of its Gen3 Chevrolet Camaros today, with Tim Slade – who comes to the team after two years at Blanchard Racing Team – at the wheel in place of Jimmy Golding, whom he shared duties at the team’s first Gen3 run last week.
So far, teams across both Chevrolet and Ford brands have cast their rivalries aside to work together on the introduction of the new Gen3 Supercars, with Triple Eight Race Engineering Team Principal Jamie Whincup suggesting that the earlier runs of teams benefit the entire field.
Common among teams has been data collation, with issues such as wheel spindles and centre bearings at various shakedowns seeing a ‘coming together of the minds’ in an effort to solve issues that may affect the entire Supercars field.
“Teams have been obviously working together very well, up until probably Newcastle I reckon … there’s no official end date on that group chat, but I promise you, it’s going to go very quiet!”PremiAir Racing has a technical alliance with Triple Eight, however, whom it shared Queensland Raceway with last Thursday as Triple Eight became the first team to run two Gen3 Supercars.
The collaboration saw the PremiAir Camaro able to run in close proximity to Shane van Gisbergen’s #97 Camaro in particular, as both teams explored the impact of the Gen3 aerodynamic package, which brings significantly reduced downforce.
“All the information we get from Triple Eight is beneficial, whether it be from small to big areas when we need that, and we’re just all learning together,” said Cook. “So, you know, they need us just as much as we need them as well, because they’re interested in all the information that comes out of our cars. And we share that openly.”
Last week’s shakedown wasn’t as smooth as Cook would have liked but served its purpose as the team looks to get further into performance running at QR today.
“We had some electrical Gremlins at the start of the day, but that was more was more zeroing ECUs and ECUs talking to engines. And just a couple of things that were a little bit out of our control, we had Craig [Hasted] rectifying some of those issues for us … once we got on top of that, it was actually on track running our program was very simple.”
“We still need to be very simplistic with our approach to the laps that we do initially. But we want to, probably by hour two or three, we really want to be getting into some longer lap running and again, just making sure that the car is performing how it should and towards the end and we’ll start to tune a bit of performance into the car as well.”
