A RAFT of technical changes have been made to the Gen3 Supercars for Sunday at Albert Park following fires in the Friday and Saturday races.
James Courtney’s Tickford Racing Mustang burst into flames on the opening lap of Saturday evening’s race, a day after a seemingly identical disaster befell Walkinshaw Andretti United’s Nick Percat.
The second incident triggered an emergency meeting of the category’s Technical Working Group last night, which was followed by a meeting of all team owners.
While the source of the fires remains unknown, a number of changes have been made as a risk mitigation effort to enable today’s race to take place.
They are headlined by a switch to a Safety Car start, as revealed this morning by V8 Sleuth.
Technical changes include tweaks to the oil system and removal of the tyre pressure monitoring system on the left-front wheel of all cars.
“This is obviously very, very serious,” said Supercars powerbroker and Fox Sports broadcaster Mark Skaife.
“From a safety perspective, everybody is working very hard. We had all of the team owners and all of the technical directors together last night to go through an action plan to mitigate the risk today.
“There’s about eight major items that we have put in place – one of those items is actually going to start the race behind the Safety Car because we believe that the exhaust being superheated at the start, when you’re sitting there on the rev limiter for the period of time before a standing start, is actually part of this.
“Because both of the incidents with Nick Percat and James Courtney have happened on the opening lap, we believe that there is something from a temperature perspective that is setting this off and it has obviously two different teams from two different Mustangs.
“So at the moment the plan is to do a complete forensic investigation, it’s a little bit like an air crash investigation, you’re not going to fix this overnight but what you do need to do is acknowledge that we have to observe the risk and understand what the risk is.
“All teams have been incredible, we were still doing data acquisition and looking at things at 2 o’clock in the morning, they were all still together at midnight, they were back here again at 5:30.
“In fact our ex-director from television was looking at all the vision trying to find additional information for us.
“We need to do a very, very intense look at all of the elements to how this is because there’s not a single person in this industry that actually knows what that the source, what the ignitor of this.
“We don’t actually know yet… it’s going to take a little bit of time and we’ll be very, very careful with how we go about it and we have got to mitigate the risk for today.”
Supercars CEO Shane Howard addressed the situation via a statement.
“Following yesterday’s race at the Beaurepaires Melbourne SuperSprint, Supercars convened its Gen3 technical working group and consulted with key stakeholders, including Motorsport Australia and the Supercars Team officials and owners,” he said.
“Following those discussions, Supercars has now put in place a risk mitigation plan for today’s race. As part of the plan, Supercars has determined that today’s race will commence under safety car with all cars to begin in single-file formation.
“As always, the safety of our drivers, team personnel and marshals is paramount to Supercars. In consultation with the Supercars Commission, Supercars and the Gen3 technical working group will conduct a further review into this weekend’s incidents over the coming weeks and in advance of the Perth SuperSprint.”
The fourth and final race of the weekend at Albert Park is set to get underway at 10:25am local time.
