Jamie Whincup has provided an update on the progress of Triple Eight’s Gen3 programme, outlining they are ahead of schedule.
The new era of the Supercars Championship will see the Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang hit the track for the 2023 season-opener in March.
Gen3’s development has been a hot topic, with Speedcafe.com revealing this week the project is going through a late redesign, while the engines have reached parity.
Triple Eight is working closely with Supercars on the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) of the control chassis which will be run under the Camaro and Mustang bodies.
With the redesigned chassis now finalised, the project will go into its manufacturing phase.
The process of fabricating the chassis is split amongst parties to share the load.
Walkinshaw Andretti United, Erebus Motorsport and Triple Eight will construct their own chassis, while PACE Innovations will turn around another batch of builds.
Despite a technical alliance with Triple Eight, Matt Stone Racing is one of the teams who will be delivered a chassis from PACE, with those remaining outfits assembling the car themselves.
Triple Eight will build eight Camaros for its own Supercars Championship team, Red Bull Ampol Racing, as well as its customer teams.
That includes two each for Team 18 and PremiAir Racing, while the remaining two will be spares.
“We’re well past halfway, certainly on the chassis,” Whincup told Speedcafe.com as a means of a project update.
“I’d say we’re here ahead of schedule. We’ve never had a chassis built in July the year before we’re about to race it.
“We’ve moved from different model cars…and then we moved from Ford to Holden, which was a complete change from one car to the next.
“When we did that change we weren’t even close to starting building it until right at the end of the year.
“So to have most of the componentry already designed and quite a substantial amount manufactured already, yeah, we’re well ahead of where we’ve ever been when we’ve had to do this car change, which we’ve done at least a couple of times before.”
Whincup went into detail as to the weeks ahead on the Gen3 project, with many people coming and going from the Triple Eight workshop.
One of the bare chassis is being used as a template with regard to wiring looms and oil lines, before those features are worked back into the CAD.
“We’re gonna build eight to start with and yeah, we’re well past halfway certainly on the chassis,” added Whincup.
“We’ve actually got a chassis centre clip basically complete, which we’re allowing Supercars to work out of our workshop on designing the wiring loom and also all the air and oil lines throughout the whole car.
“So we’re just using one of those chassis as a template.
“Once the guy [who has] got the contract for the wiring looms, once he’s finished his design and then once [the guy] from Grove [Racing], who is actually helping out with all the air lines and fluid lines, once he works out where they all should be run and whatnot, then there’ll be holes all through the car.
“And there could be bolts and nuts which have to be added, so that all then has to go back into the design and then put in the CAD, and then those parts are then issued so we can manufacture.”
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