STEERING racks emerged as a point of concern in Townsville as a series of long-distance races await the Repco Supercars Championship.
Many teams in Townsville were left to rue steering issues, which most notably forced Walkinshaw Andretti United’s Chaz Mostert out of the Sunday race almost immediately.
Already peeved by continuing parity woes, Mostert took aim by publicly calling out “another control part that’s failed” – a stance which WAU co-owner Ryan Walkinshaw doubled down on.
“We’ve gone through four racks this weekend, one of them was because of touching the concrete, the other failures were just failures,” Walkinshaw said on the post-race broadcast.
Tim Slade was another to suffer, although PremiAir Racing director of engineering Geoff Slater was a little more diplomatic.
“For Tim it has been a tough weekend with some unexpected steering issues plaguing the #23 which hurt his progress in qualifying and also in race trim unfortunately,” said Slater.
“We will take the lessons we need to from this one, put in the work to find out what exactly is going on with the #23, and make sure we can do a better job in Sydney in a few weeks’ time.”
Tickford CEO Tim Edwards did not mince his words.
“We know the power steering rack is not fit for purpose,” he told V8 Sleuth on Sunday night.
“We have obviously got work to do there but obviously we have been distracted with a million other things. Walkinshaws put a steering rack in after Chaz’s moment and did two laps and it blew apart.
“It’s a piece of junk, there’s no other way to describe it. It’s a piece of junk and we’re persisting with it.
“We have broken so many of them, it’s just an absolute piece of junk.
“There’s some teams that have just been lucky and I don’t know why they’ve been lucky but there has been so many steering rack issues this year.
“We know the front end is a bit fragile and front steer and there’s that sort of thing but that’s stuff you can work on tuning and change wall thickness and change joint sizes and stuff like that.
“But the steering rack is just a piece that we’re given and they can’t even keep up with the spares required for it because there is that many failing all the time.”
While the first half of the season has predominantly featured sprint races, reliability will come under more scrutiny as the calendar now shifts to longer distance formats – including the Sandown 500 and Bathurst 1000 enduros.
