Walkinshaw Andretti United’s Chaz Mostert has said that today’s test at Winton Raceway will provide ‘validation’ to the team on its set-up direction following limited pre-season running with the arrival of the new Gen3 Supercars.
It will also allow the team to experiment and chase raw speed after up and down performances across the 2023 Supercars grid with 25 fresh race cars built to a new set of regulations.
The Mobil 1 Optus Ford Mustang driver left the opening round at Newcastle in March leading the points as the new Gen3 Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro made their championship debut.
That was a result of two second places – one behind former Tickford team-mate Cam Waters in Race 1, the other behind Red Bull Ampol Racing’s Shane van Gisbergen – with Mostert saying at the time that leading meant little given it was the opening event of this year’s 12-round championship.
While wearing orange numbers into the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, with the Albert Park, Western Australia and Tasmania rounds complete, Mostert now sits third in the standings (820 points) behind the two Erebus Motorsport Camaro drivers, Brodie Kostecki (986) and Will Brown (899).
Yet that appear tenuous, as Mostert has van Gisbergen only six points in arrears, Broc Feeney 25 behind and Waters only 63 points adrift, with all having won at least one race so far this season apart from the WAU driver.
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“Obviously, from a points perspective, we’ve been pretty consistent, just gaining points,” Mostert told Speedcafe.
“Newcastle has been our best weekend of the year, and then at the Grand Prix and Perth, initially we just didn’t have good speed.
“We fixed that for Sunday at Perth and made the car a lot better. Then in Tasmania, I thought we were we were pretty close. We just really struggled being able to get the car super-fast for one lap.
The Clayton-based team will head to Winton Raceway in Victoria today where a number of Supercars teams including Tickford Racing and Grove Racing are expected to join them.
While Mostert is third, WAU team-mate Nick Percat sits further back in 24th position, following several issues, the most dramatic of which was a fire at the Australian Grand Prix.
“For us, it’s important to go to this test day and validate what what’s been right in the first four rounds and what’s been wrong,” Mostert told Speedcafe.
“We’re a third of the season gone … for us as a team, we’ve found we’ve been right and been wrong several times over the season so far, so it’s to clarify all those kinds of things.”
The late coming together of the Gen3 Supercars program for both Ford and Chevrolet teams has also seen teams struggle to remain consistently within a performance window, which has seen volatile form not only between events but from race-to-race during a weekend.
“No doubt, there’s a part of the plan for the test day of things that we haven’t had time to quite get around and try and get a direction as well.
“I feel like definitely there’s been one, one-and-a-half rounds that we think pretty we’ve been pretty on the money with the car,” Mostert said.
“Even though we might have not won races, the car has felt good. And then there’s been two rounds where I felt like we’ve definitely missed the mark, so Winton is about validating that and also a test program of trying to make the car faster as well.”
Northern-based teams including Dick Johnson Racing, Triple Eight Race Engineering, PremiAir Racing and Matt Stone Racing will test at Queensland Raceway on Thursday.
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