THE aero upgrades granted to the five Ford teams for this weekend’s NTI Townsville 500 has left three-time Supercars champion Shane van Gisbergen less than impressed.
Van Gisbergen returned to Australia this week off the back of winning his first ever NASCAR Cup Series race in spectacular fashion in Chicago.
MORE: Van Gisbergen reveals post-Chicago NASCAR interest
Since then, a results-triggered parity review has sparked Supercars to make a series of changes to the rear end of the Mustang. Engine performance had long been considered the cause of a deficiency before the focus recently shifted back to aero.
“I read all that last night trying to study for the weekend,” van Gisbergen told SEN’s Matt White today on his Mornings with Matt White program.
“It looks like someone’s closed their eyes and thrown a dart at the dartboard on that parity stuff, it’s a bit of a shame but it’s kind of overruling our sport at the moment so, yeah, it’s a shame.
“You’ve just got to now knuckle down and drive it and see what happens, but yeah, it’s not real good at the moment.
“But we’ve got to do our best as a team to be the best we can and get through the weekend with no mistakes.”
While Triple Eight boss Jamie Whincup has warned about differentiating between technical parity and sporting parity, Supercars did detect “a minor difference in rear downforce” during a data overlay process.
Such work sits outside of the championship’s standard parity checks, which on the aero front revolves around straight-line testing.
The Ford tweaks were trialled on-track last week at Winton and Queensland Raceway, on Tickford Racing and Dick Johnson Racing cars respectively, with comparative work completed via CFD (computational fluid dynamics) in the United Kingdom.
Practice for the Townsville 500 takes place tomorrow, with the opening session starting 10:10am.
SEN will provide live coverage of Sunday’s action, led by V8 Sleuth managing director Aaron Noonan.
