SHANE van Gisbergen will switch into Triple Eight Race Engineering’s wildcard chassis for this weekend’s Beaurepaires Sydney SuperNight following handling woes with his original Gen3 Camaro.
Van Gisbergen was visibly frustrated with his car’s steering tendencies at both the Darwin Triple Crown and Townsville 500, with his Triple Eight crew working tirelessly to try to get to the bottom of the issue.
Triple Eight team manager Mark Dutton believes they have now done so, but a no-risk approach will see van Gisbergen swap into the spare car for this weekend anyway.
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Van Gisbergen will drive 888A-063 at Sydney Motorsport Park, with that chassis having just one round under its belt: namely Zane Goddard’s solo wildcard at Hidden Valley.
Van Gisbergen had a brief steer of the car, as is permitted under rules, during Goddard/Craig Lowndes’ test at Queensland Raceway on July 12 and reported positively about that chassis.
“We believe we’ve found at least some of the issues and the major issue from Townsville,” Dutton told V8 Sleuth.
“We have communicated that with Supercars… we’re not going to go into detail of the exact nuts and bolts of it but effectively we could have something that could be an improvement for everyone up and down pitlane.
“Even if they’re not having that particular issue, it’s the learnings that you need to communicate up and down pitlane.
“So although we’re very confident we have the fix for Shane’s car, we still took the opportunity to say well, we are in the fortunate position where we do have a spare chassis.
“With the fact that you can’t get a test in to check if you have actually fixed it, the less risk was to run the wildcard chassis this weekend.”
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888A-060, which van Gisbergen drove in the opening six rounds, has also made the trek to Eastern Creek.
“Because we have a ride day after this weekend (on Monday), the cars can be back-to-backed at the ride day,” said Dutton.
“We’ll compare and contrast the differences across the cars at the ride day to fully confirm if we have fixed it completely or to a certain percentage.”
The next time Triple Eight will race all three of its main game cars on the same weekend will be the Sandown 500 in September.
