Grove Racing team boss Stephen Grove has explained the rationale behind bringing Walkinshaw Racing onboard to support its engine programme this year.

The 2022 season marks the first in the Repco Supercars Championship as a solo operation for Grove Racing after acquiring the remainder of the Kelly family’s stake in the Braeside-based squad late last year.

Last month, Speedcafe.com revealed Grove Racing had formed a technical alliance with Walkinshaw Racing.

In what is the final year of the Gen2 regulations, one might question why the team would invest in the outgoing engine platform.

Stranger still, Walkinshaw Racing has long been associated with General Motors products, rather than the Ford-based engine powering the Grove Racing’s pair of Mustangs.

Ultimately, it boils down to the teams’ championship and Grove Racing’s desire to move as far up the pit lane as possible in time for the advent of Gen3 in 2023 – Grove seeing little issue in the Clayton-based organisation’s previous manufacturer ties.

“For us, Gen3 not coming along this year left us a bit in limbo, so we’re trying to manage the current car and make sure we can get some more performance out of it, which we need to do,” Grove told Speedcafe.com.

“We’re still heavily investing in the current Gen2 car. We’re mindful that we’ve only got 12 rounds to go now, so then we’ve got to switch our minds to Gen3 as well.

“We’re trying to run that concurrently, that’s why we brought Steve Robertson on to help us build our Gen3 cars so we can run two programmes at once. One is improving Gen2 this year and concurrently we can start to develop Gen3.

“The most important thing for us is the teams’ championship. We’re not talking that we think we can win that, it’s certainly off the cards, but what we are trying to do is get a few more places and get further up the grid.

“If we spend the time and effort this year to get Gen3 right, we start in a pretty good position next year.”

In a sport of tenths, hundredths, and thousandths of a second, eeking out what engine performance the team can could make a major difference for Grove Racing.

As Grove explained, Walkinshaw Racing has greater capacity and capability to help the Supercars squad find that time.

“They’ve got the infrastructure to be able to map our motors and put them on dynos and tell us where we’re short and where we’re not short,” he said.

“They’ve got a maintenance programme on the motors for us.

“They are very good at the way they build their motors and the way they maintain it and the infrastructure they have.

“It’s just trying to get a bit more performance out of the motor, just trying to get a bit more in relation to mapping, trying to look at the fuel consumption.

“We’ve brought their resources on to help us do that this year.”

In the changeover from part to full ownership, Grove had indicated a technical relationship with the Kelly family would remain in relation to the engine department.

That’s no longer the case, although Grove said he does lean on Todd Kelly, having led the team’s Ford Mustang engine development in the 2019/20 off-season.

“Todd still has some input helping us,” said Grove.

“He’s a good sounding board for me. I still talk to Todd and we still work through a lot of issues, but it’s just having that infrastructure.

“Walkinshaw Racing, which is a different entity to Walkinshaw Andretti United, their pedigree in building engines is second to none.

“We’re just getting them to help us develop the motor further. Todd has done an awesome job getting the motor to where it is, but now it’s tenths of seconds we’re looking for.”