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CoolDrive Racing team principal Tim Blanchard says a myriad of factors played into the team’s decision to switch engine suppliers.
Establishing itself as a one-car Supercars squad last year, the team fielded a Tickford Racing-built Ford Mustang with Tim Slade at the wheel.
In what is now year two of their fledgling Repco Supercars Championship programme, the team will continue to use the same chassis from the Campbellfield squad, but Tickford Racing will no longer be its engine supplier.
Instead, Herrod Performance Engines – which powers Dick Johnson Racing’s Ford Mustangs – will supply the Blanchard Racing Team.
Initially, Mostech Race Engines had been tasked with supplying Ford units for the next-generation of Supercars, dubbed Gen3.
In the wake of Steve Amos retiring, that programme has shifted across to Herrod Performance Engines.
For Blanchard, there were plenty of synergies, including an existing relationship with Dick Johnson Racing that stemmed back to his early days of Supercars competition, and a vision towards 2023 and Gen3.
“I guess we just looked at a number of things for the new season and how we could perform,” Blanchard told Speedcafe.com.
“We had an existing relationship with DJR and Mostech Race Engines as it was known then from my driving days, so I had a personal relationship with them and obviously Slade from his endurance drive [with Dick Johnson Racing in 2020].
“There were a number of factors but it’s also working alongside DJR and now Herrods moving towards Gen3, as well as kind of just trying to look to the future and aligning yourself with who we need to be aligned with for the future.”
In many ways, it’s the best of both worlds for the Blanchard Racing Team with arguably one of the best chassis-engine combinations on the grid.
Although the team had a technical alliance with Tickford Racing, Blanchard admitted his satellite outfit became less reliant on data sharing as the 2021 season wore on.
Even though the engine supplier switch puts them more in line with Dick Johnson Racing, the Box Hill-based team stands on its own feet with no technical alliance to another outfit in 2022.
“Obviously, we still had a relationship with Tickford, but we definitely kind of went off in our own separate direction in the middle of last year,” Blanchard explained.
“There’s no formal agreement with anyone for this year moving forward.
“Mirko [De Rosa, race engineer] has a pretty clear direction where he wants to go from a set-up point of view.
“I think we were more competitive as the year went on, so as we develop more towards his direction I’m confident that if we keep pushing that way that we should have a pretty strong package this year.
“From an engine perspective, yes, it’s more in line with DJR,” Blanchard added.
“From a chassis set-up point of view, we’ve gotten some great engineering resources in-house ourselves with obviously Mirko leading the race engineering.
“Brendan [Hogan, team manager] is a very good engineer himself. So we’ve got two very highly experienced engineers that were really driving the direction last year for our car themselves.
“We felt confident that we had enough of a handle on it to have a crack at doing it ourselves.
“When you employ experienced people like Brendan and Mirko, you need to give them enough rope to put the ideas forward and execute their ideas. So that’s what it’s all about. I’m confident that they’ve got the ability to deliver.”
The changeover hasn’t been without its challenges.
As Herrod Performance Engines owner Rob Herrod explained, the marriage between the engine and chassis came with its own set of hurdles.
“Tim approached me going back to the Darwin round last year,” Herrod told Speedcafe.com.
“We sort of thought, it’s not a straightforward thing to put a DJR-spec engine into a Tickford chassis.
“So there was a great amount of work needed by the Blanchard people to be able to do that.
“That was my first thing to Tim, I said, ‘Hey, you need to be aware of this but we’re happy to work with you’.”
Blanchard is optimistic that his team will reap the rewards of what he hopes will be a performance gain. Herrod echoed that sentiment.
“The feedback we have got from Blanchards, everything we have supplied them they have been over the moon with in every aspect,” said Herrod.
“Even just in the presentation when the engines arrive to them, the way it is all sealed up and everything like that, they’re just like, ‘It’s another level’
“I think engine-wise we can,” Herrod said of helping deliver a performance gain.
“They’re a great bunch of people, very enthusiastic, very passionate… to come out last year from nowhere to where they went is just phenomenal I believe.”
