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Chassis maintenance has become a talking point recently as the crop of Gen3 continue to hit new age milestones.
It appears teams have been dealing with cracking issues, particularly in the rear clip, as explained by team owner Brad Jones in a video late last week.
According to Supercars General Manager of Motorsport Tim Edwards, the issues are similar to what has been seen in the past with previous generations of chassis, and therefore not unexpected.
They are also not entirely new to the Gen3 platform given additional gusseting has been permitted in the past.
The solution to the latest issue will be a fix agreed on by the Technical Working Group and implemented category wide, probably in time for the Sandown 500.
“This is not a new thing; even with the previous generation cars, around the bird cage or the rear of the car, after 12 months of hard running, they start to develop cracks,” Edwards explained to Speedcafe.
“So you’ve just got to be on top of it. And they were seeing similar things with the Gen3 cars in the early days and there was some gussets that were permitted that everybody rolled out onto their cars last year.
“But we’re now seeing some cracks in other areas so we just need to expand on that.
“There will be some other little gussets appear. But we just want to go through the process, get the TWG together, because we’ve got three different ideas of what we should do to improve it.
“We need to get the TWG together and say, ‘okay, what are we going to do? We don’t want three different versions. What are we going to do?’ and get them to all agree.
“And then we’ll roll that out as an upgrade that the teams are allowed to do. Most likely for Sandown, I would have thought.”
It came to light last week that the issue had prompted a warning from Supercars Technical to teams reminding them that unapproved chassis modifications were not allowed.
Edwards says he understands the habitual nature of problem-solving in the paddock, but stressed that the Gen3 era can’t allow ‘rogue’ modifications.
“It was just reminding teams that this is not Car of the Future, this is Gen3,” he said.
“Yes, with Car of the Future, if you had a crack there, you would just literally go downstairs with your fabicrator and go, ‘right, I want a gusset here, a gusset there, weld this there, do that there…’
“That’s not the category anymore. We need all the cars the same. We don’t need anyone going rogue, doing their own thing.”
