The Campbellfield-based squad streamlining from four Championship entries to two this year but is yet to confirm competition numbers for Cam Waters and Thomas Randle.
While Waters would presumably continue with #6, there are two obvious options for Randle; #5 or #55.
It appears that Tickford has settled on the latter, given the prominence it has been given in the aforementioned Instagram video, which shows the team preparing its Mustangs for the season ahead.
That is a notable development because #5 harks back to Tickford Racing’s very first days, the team being created from the acquisition of Glenn Seton Racing (GSR) by Prodrive ahead of the 2003 V8 Supercars Championship.
GSR fielded Car #5 in the 2002 season and Tickford had done so ever since, except for Mark Winterbottom’s season as reigning champion in 2016 and a handful of one-offs, such as the switch to #95 as a nod to his involvement in a Cars movie, or running Greg Ritter in Car #80 at Oran Park in 2005 to mark Ford Australia’s 80th anniversary.
Furthermore, in each of its previous stints as a two-car team, it had run #5 and #6 (again, with limited exceptions), and both have won the Bathurst 1000 (in 2013 and 2014, respectively).
#55, though, also has significance within Campbellfield, given it is a traditional Rod Nash Racing number.
Nash was a customer of the team before becoming one of its owners, while Randle has only raced with #55 since stepping up to the Championship on a full-time basis in 2022.
James Courtney most recently drove Car #5, but he has made the off-season move to the Blanchard Racing Team, where he will steer the #7 Mustang.
For Waters, the start of the 2024 campaign should represent a return to #6 after he ran with #43 at Adelaide as a tribute to the late Ken Block, winning the Saturday race in the South Australian capital.
Tickford/Randle is not the only source of numerological interest ahead of the 2024 season, with Triple Eight Race Engineering yet to reveal Will Brown’s.
Triple Eight has run Cars #88 and #97 on a full-time basis for the past five years but the latter is the ‘trademark’ of Brown’s predecessor at the team, Shane van Gisbergen.
Tickford and the rest of the southern-based teams are set to test at Winton on Wednesday, February 7.
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