MATT Stone Racing has become the third main game team to announce it will end its Dunlop Super2 Series program ahead of next year.
MSR has title-winning history in the second tier of Supercars, courtesy of Todd Hazelwood in 2017, and this season fielded multiple cars in both Super2 (Aaron Seton and Ryal Harris) and Super3 (Jason Gomersall and Chris Smerdon).
However, it has now made the decision to put all its eggs in the Repco Supercars Championship basket as the Gen3 era debuts.
It comes after a horrid second half of 2022 for MSR.
The Yatala team started strongly with Todd Hazelwood regularly inside the top 10 and Jack Le Brocq nabbing a front-row start in Tasmania, only for both to later be plagued by incidents, unreliability and a general lack of pace.
Stone has reacted accordingly, swinging change.
“We still will be doing a little bit, some Super3 and the odd restoration stuff that we took on a lot of this year,” he explained to V8 Sleuth.
“But the main thing is that we’re pulling out of Super2 and we’re downsizing the Super3 thing to really put all of our resources behind Gen3 and trying to run the best two-car main game operation that we can.”
The overwhelming feeling had become that resources were being spread too thin.
“Through the couple of COVID seasons that we had, we were fully focused on main game because that was the only show in town and we had little bits and pieces of support category work but nothing too substantial,” Stone continued.
“This year being the first full normal year after COVID, we massively expanded in all other areas, be that we’re running two Super2 cars, two Super3 cars and we were doing some other car restoration programs in the background.
“Having looked at our performance in the COVID years versus this year, we’ve decided that we want to take a step back to that model and focus predominantly on main game with just a few little side projects but no major commitments such as the multi-car Super2/Super3 program that we ran this year.”
MSR will run Gen3 Camaros next year for Le Brocq and rookie Cameron Hill.
As for its Super2 incumbents, Seton is tipped to announce plans for another full Super2 season in due course, while Harris has long been expected to be exiting the series.
MSR follows Triple Eight and Grove Racing in departing Super2.
Triple Eight has clinched the past two Super2 titles but found itself unable to secure the necessary equipment to continue in 2023, when only the ZB Commodore and Gen2 Mustang will be eligible.
As for the Groves, they had only entered Super2 with the express purpose of getting Matt Payne ready for a 2023 promotion to the main game.
