TICKFORD Racing CEO Tim Edwards is not getting ahead of himself after a strong start to the Darwin Triple Crown.
Tickford had three cars in the top five in final practice yesterday, with James Courtney second, Cam Waters third and Thomas Randle fifth.
It was a half-hour session dominated by Fords, with Dick Johnson Racing’s Anton De Pasquale fastest of all.
Parity has been a sore point this year with Chevrolets first across the line in every race to date, but there are signs of a turning point this weekend at Hidden Valley.
Edwards though remains cautious.
“It’s practice. Obviously there were people out there with issues, I don’t know what happened with Chaz (Mostert), I think Gizzy (Shane van Gisbergen) had a steering problem or whatever it was,” he told V8 Sleuth.
“It’s encouraging but it is only practice.
“You’ve seen in many qualifying sessions this year that you can be up in one quali session and 10 minutes later you’re 10 places different.
“It’s very close amongst all of the cars so I’m not counting my chickens just yet.”
A truer indication of the formline should emerge by the end of qualifying today, which will run to a three-part knockout format starting at 11:30am local time (midday AEST).
The 11 Mustangs in the field are running a new engine map this weekend, while Chevrolet has reverted to a previous spec after a troublesome trial of a new version in Practice 1.
As opposed to years gone by, engine maps are now a controlled item, with one setting for all Fords and one setting for all Chevrolets.
“The silly thing is, all the things that we’re doing on both sides at all the races at the moment, they’re things that we would have been doing every single weekend last year,” Edwards explained.
“You had your own engine bloke and the drivers would come in and say ‘it’s fluttery off Turn 2’ or whatever and the engine blokes would get in there and they’d tweak things.
“The only reason it has kind of blown up into this big thing is because we’re all sitting there with our hands tied behind our back because it’s no longer in our control to make those tweaks.
“In fact, some of the drivers are asking for different things and they could do that in the past because they had their own engine bloke there and if you’re a driver that likes ‘x’ kind of feel, you could tune it a little bit more to your driving style.
“Now, all 25 drivers are dealing with an engine that doesn’t have the same response characteristics as an engine that’s got eight butterflies and all that sort of thing.
“It was never going to feel the same, they’re all wishing it felt the same as the old one but it doesn’t, because you have got one big butterfly and it’s a different feel.”
