Brad Jones Racing is a hive of activity as team team gets its Supercars ready for dispatch to Newcastle, following recent confirmation of the minimum weight for Gen3.
Brad Jones explains in the team’s latest video, “We only got the weights for the car – the axle weight, the driver weight, and the whole car weight – yesterday or Wednesday – it’s all a bit of a blur at the moment – so the boys are working out how they achieve what’s been set for them.
“So, we’ve got some lead and some steel and we’re moving around the cars and mounting them into position.”
As he goes on to show, some weight has to be mounted quite high around the engine bay of the team’s Chevrolets, given the Camaro’s pushrod engine is much smaller and lighter than the double overheard cam units in the Ford Mustangs.
“To get the LS engine up to where it needs to be, there’s weight that’s bolted on the engine, but these two bits of material here are to bring the front axle weight up and the engine weight up,” adds Jones.
“The reason they’re so high is because the centre of gravity of the Ford engine’s higher than the Chev, and so we need that weight up high so they’ve got some parity.”
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Minimum car/driver and front axle weights were announced yesterday, with the 1335kg figure for the former representing a 65kg reduction relative to the final year of Gen2 in the Repco Supercars Championship.
While Camaro and Mustang Gen3 race cars are largely identical under the skin, the fact that they are powered by somewhat different engine configurations means centre of gravity would also differ if not for the particular placement of weights around the engine bay.
It is one of the areas of the Supercars rulebook which is now tightly specified after controversy following the introduction of the ZB Commodore, with its lightweight panels, in 2018 and then the Gen2 Ford Mustang, the first coupe of the championship’s modern era, in the following season.
The Thrifty Newcastle 500 takes place on March 10-12.
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