THOMAS Randle’s Tickford Racing Mustang is undertaking development work on behalf of Supercars at the Boost Mobile Gold Coast 500.
The #55 Castrol Mustang is running a Tickford-designed steering rack, which the team is offering up as a replacement to the much-maligned current control part.
Some teams have complained about inconsistent steering feel and failures with the Sportech Engineering-supplied unit specified for Gen3.
MORE: Engineering shake-up at Tickford ahead of GC500
Triple Eight, which designed the bulk of the Gen3 car for Supercars, has tested various revisions of that rack as the category troubleshoots a solution for 2024.
Tickford – which has been one of the most vocal critics of the Sportech system – has meanwhile pushed its own alternate solution, based on the rack it used prior to Gen3.
Supercars Head of Motorsport Adrian Burgess confirmed to V8 Sleuth that the category recently evaluated the Tickford rack with Cam Waters and the Monster Energy Mustang in a test at Winton.
Permission was also granted to run it on the Gold Coast, where Tickford has opted to run it in Randle’s car.
“Clearly the TWG (Technical Working Group) has been looking at all the issues we’ve had with the steering rack this year,” Burgess told V8 Sleuth.
“We’ve got parallel programs of development underway to, a) rectify and improve the current package and, b) look at an alternative package.
“Tickford has come forward with an alternative package, they did a day at Winton on it 10 days ago and it looked OK, so we’ve given them permission to run it this weekend.
“Also, we’ve been spending a lot of time with another team (Triple Eight) trying to retro some mods into the current one.
“There’s obviously a lot of hardware already in place, a lot of money has been spent, so it’s not just a straightforward decision, throw that in the bin and start again.
“We’ll carry on doing the work and then the business will make a decision on what it does next.
“At the moment there’s no decisions, we’re doing the homework, developed a new part, and they’re doing the work on the circuit to make sure it’s fit for purpose before any discussion can be had.”
Burgess stressed that there’s no performance advantage from running the different rack.
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Tickford boss Tim Edwards told V8 Sleuth after Practice 2 that the team is encouraged by the rack’s performance.
“We’re happy with how it performed today, so we’ll continue running it at least for tomorrow at this stage and see how it performs,” Edwards said.
“It’s early stages, it’s only had one day at Winton to evaluate, so this is its second outing, but so far all the signs are positive.”
Edwards said that power steering pump issues experienced by Randle in Practice 1 were unrelated to the rack itself.
While that was resolved on the Castrol car for Practice 2, teammate rookie Declan Fraser suffered power steering pump issues in both sessions.
Edwards is hopeful of solving that problem ahead of qualifying on Saturday, which the 23-year-old will tackle without a flying lap under his belt.
