TICKFORD Racing CEO Tim Edwards is hoping further aero tweaks will be made, despite the Mustang’s strong performance at The Bend.
Aside from championship leader Brodie Kostecki’s dominant form, the Chevrolet contingent was generally outdone by their Ford counterparts across the OTR SuperSprint.
That’s despite little changing round-to-round, besides a return to using different shift cuts.
An increase to rear downforce (prior to Townsville) and a move to a smaller 80mm throttle body (prior to Sydney) were aimed at improving driveability and reducing extreme tyre degradation for the Mustang.
There have clearly been some level of gains made, but straight-line speed has continued to be a concern among Ford teams given the multiple long straights that feature at both enduro events: Sandown and Bathurst.
So, while it might seem strange to be talking about parity tweaks after a good weekend for the Blue Oval, there’s very good reason why Tickford and Dick Johnson Racing stayed back at The Bend yesterday for further aero work.
“Certainly we’re very confident that there’s still issues and we know what we did for Townsville was a bit of a band-aid and it’s got negative issues with it as well – nothing is for free,” Edwards said on Sunday evening.
“But we have just got to rely on Supercars and Ford and all of the CFD work that’s going on.”
Walkinshaw Andretti United star Chaz Mostert took two podiums across the weekend but regularly referred to The Bend as a “blip on the radar”, in terms of not being transferrable to other circuits.
Asked if he’d like to see immediate action prior to the Sandown 500, Edwards affirmed.
“Would we like to see a change? Absolutely,” he said.
“We saw we struggled for straight-line speed at Sydney Motorsport Park and that’s a bit of a consequence of the change that we made for Townsville.
“When you rush these things through, there’s always a negative for every positive that you try to implement, but at the moment we’re not really focused on that, we’re just trying to execute as well as we can.”
Whether such an aero change can be made in-season without the parity trigger having been hit again is another matter, meaning the Tailem Bend testing might be more applicable for the longer term.
Either way, Tickford is determined to simply get the best out of what it has got.
“We have learnt a lot with this new aero package over the last three rounds,” Edwards continued.
“We rolled it out at Townsville and literally the car was completely different in practice to what we were expecting, and the guys worked hard and we got ourselves back in the window at Townsville.
“We went to Sydney, a very different circuit, it’s aero, it’s tyre, and then we’ve come here and it’s a different characteristic again.
“You’re always sort of filling your toolbox with all the information that you learn along the way. We’ll help as much as we can but just try to execute as best we can ourselves.”
This season marks the first multi-round endurance season since 2019, with the Sandown 500 taking place on September 15-17 and the Repco Bathurst 1000 across October 5-8.
