EREBUS Motorsport has boosted its 2024 Repco Supercars Championship campaign with the purchase of a state-of-the-art laser positional scanner.
According to championship-winning engineer George Commins, it’s the only one of its kind to fall into the hands of an Australian motorsport team.
It’s an investment understood to be in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars – something that is confidence-inspiring at a time when key sponsors have left.
“It just makes a statement that we’re always trying to do things better and this is the next stage for that,” Commins told V8 Sleuth of the technology which arrived to Erebus HQ on Wednesday.
“It will make our bodywork more accurate, it will make our set-ups more accurate, it will make the characterisations of the cars after they’ve been built more accurate.
“It’s just all about doing things better than everybody else.”
While laser scanning is not new among Supercars teams, Commins says the new system acquired by Erebus has various benefits.
“What makes it unique to all of the other ones is that the envelope that you can scan is virtually unlimited because of the way the system can track your movements,” he explained.
“So you can move the car and keep scanning and keep building and that’s quite unique. As opposed to other ones that have the digital measuring arms, this is just totally free floating.
“It means that we can scan the entire body of the car, which we have done on both cars, and compare between the cars to make sure they’re both the same, compare them to the scan that’ll have come from Supercars from Windshear and then we can measure precisely the wing positions, all of the legality documents.
“So it’s checking the legality of the cars, making sure we’re right at the edge of the limit, which is important for performance obviously.
“And also checking between the cars that when we’re building them, they are exactly the same.
“Obviously we do our own chassis so it’s a fantastic tool for Jimmy (White, fabricator) to be able to see when a chassis comes off the jig, how much things have moved from the pulling, from the welding.
“And then he can go back and adjust his jigs as necessary so that we know exactly as the car comes off, all of the suspension points are exactly where we think they are.
“Another example, (yesterday) we scanned a clip that had been in a small accident.
“It’s a five or 10-minute job to scan it and we can quickly work out whether it has been bent or not, and whether it is worth trying to fix, whereas normally you have to take it back and bolt it to a table or bolt it back onto the jig that you used to create it in the first place, which means rebuilding all of that, which takes huge time.”
Commins, who engineered Brodie Kostecki the last three seasons, will guide Todd Hazelwood at next weekend’s Thrifty Bathurst 500.
“We’re all keen to just get back into it and do the best job we can,” said Commins.
