Red Bull Ampol Racing is determined to find the mystery issue which has affected Shane van Gisbergen’s car in each of the last two Supercars events.
The two-time Bathurst 1000 winner was forced to persevere with an ill-handling #97 Camaro for the bulk of the Hidden Valley weekend, before the car returned to base in Banyo ahead of another trip north.
It quickly became apparent at the NTI Townsville 500 that the dramas had not gone away, with van Gisbergen reporting a recurrence of his Darwin issues in Practice 1.
Come Race 17 at the end of the weekend, he had more problems, revealing that the “steering had a mind of its own, my throttle was jamming and cutting out, and my brakes weren’t working.”
Team Principal Jamie Whincup said that Triple Eight Race Engineering will go searching again, notwithstanding that the root cause of the handling niggles are not obvious.
“He’s reporting issues with the control parts within the car [but] we’re struggling to see it in the data; that’s the biggest thing,” Whincup told Speedcafe after Race 17.
“When we when we have an issue, we generally analyse it, find it in the data, and then we’ve got something to chase. When it’s not in the data, that’s where it becomes really difficult.
“Now, we trust Shane, he’s one of the best drivers out there, he’s 100 percent he’s feeling something, and we’ve got to find it.
“We’ve turned the car inside out at Darwin, we have when we went back to the workshop, we’ve done it again all this [Townsville] weekend, and we’ll continue to when we get back, to find this thing that he’s talking about, that we can’t see in the data.”
Brodie Kostecki also had a handling issue in Practice 1 in Townsville which prompted Erebus Motorsport to change the steering rack in the #99 Camaro and diagnose the problem back at base.
Furthermore, neither he nor van Gisbergen were alone in steering-related issues, or other technical problems, with growing frustration from a multitude of teams over control parts failures.
However, van Gisbergen has apparently suffered more than most in recent times, which may in fact be due to the three-time champion’s feel for a race car.
“We’re not sure,” responded Whincup on the question of why SVG seems to have had more issues than his rivals.
“We’re not sure if, I guess, he’s ultra-sensitive. I guess if his strength [is] being ultra-sensitive and feeling every part of the car, maybe he’s feeling something that most other drivers aren’t.
“I don’t believe that our cars are any different to all the other cars as far as the control parts are concerned. I guess he’s feeling it when others aren’t.
“…which doesn’t mean it’s right; we’ll do what we’ve always said we’ll do, and we’ve produced fantastic cars.
“We’ll keep working on it, keep refining them like we’ve done with every other car in the past.”
Broc Feeney and van Gisbergen finished fourth and fifth respectively in Race 17 despite starting 13th and 25th.
While there was late tension over team orders, van Gisbergen had masterfully helped team-mate Feeney carve through the field earlier in the piece, making his overtakes in a fashion that #88 could easily follow him through the gap.
“We work together as a team,” said Whincup, who was a beneficiary of those tactics when he drove at Townsville in 2020.
“Yeah, we work together to maximise our results, whether that’s a race result, a round result, championship… that’s what we do.
“That was good, it was great seeing both drivers work together. Shane and I have done it ourselves plenty of times, and it was cool to see him and Broc do the same thing.”
The next event is the Beaurepaires Sydney SuperNight on July 28-30.
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