IT’S Tuesday in the V8 Sleuth office in Melbourne and there’s never a shortage of questions that come through to us to answer from passionate race fans across the country and, occasionally, from overseas.
We answer plenty of questions in our special Q&A episodes on the V8 Sleuth Podcast Powered by Repco, but we get so many we thought we’d get V8 Sleuth MD Aaron Noonan to sit down on occasion and answer some in a column here on the website.
Feel free to send through your questions for us via the V8 Sleuth website here.
Let’s dip into the mailbag …
I was going over the number of race wins Holden has won and if they win 1 more race they will clock over 600 race wins – is this correct?
Matt via Email
You’re correct Matt, Holdens have now won 599 races in the history of the Australian Touring Car Championship/Repco Supercars Championship. Commodores clean swept the weekend at Albert Park with two wins to Shane van Gisbergen and two to Chaz Mostert to help move GM’s local brand to within one of the 600 mark.
No other brand has won as many races in the history of the championship as Holden.
Watching the Melbourne 400 they mentioned how long it’s been between drinks for Will Davison. My question is, who has had the longest gap between wins in Supercars history?
David Gorton via Facebook
David, you’re right, it has been a while between drinks for Will, who is chasing his first win since Bathurst in October 2016. However, while he’s no doubt frustrated at being so competitive yet not able to stand on the top step of the podium, he can take plenty of solace in that he’s a long, long way off breaking the record for the longest gap between wins.
We put together a story on this a little while back, which you can read in full here. Paul Morris is the man with the record of the longest gap between wins.
With Gen3 out next year is it time for a new tyre manufacturer as well as most drivers/teams know the current tyres like the back of their hand. Thoughts?
Mark via Facebook
Hi Mark, the change to Gen3 rules for next year and the entirely new chassis platform will see a lot of changes to the Supercars category, but one area that won’t be changing is the tyre deal.
Dunlop has a contract in place with Supercars to supply the control tyre until the end of the 2024 championship season.
There had been a mooted plan for the Goodyear brand to be used next year with the introduction of Gen3 (the company is Goodyear & Dunlop Tyres Australia), however this won’t be happening.
Do you agree with Chaz that Supercars should bring back longer races instead of sprint races?
Trent Urza via Facebook
I reckon we have a pretty good mix of race formats as it sits in the Repco Supercars Championship. Personally, I wouldn’t want a pile of 300-kilometre races on the calendar, a few here and there are fine, but the mix overall I reckon is pretty good.
How’s the Triple Eight car book coming along? And when will we get Richard Hollway on the pod?
Troy Summerfield via Facebook
Triple Eight chassis history book is coming along. Work on it will be accelerated a little more in the next few months once a few other projects are completed. It’s due for release next year, so there’s a fair away to go before it’s completed and ready to be released to market.
Richard is indeed a ripping bloke packed with stories and experience; he’d be a great podcast guest. I’d be up for it if he was!
How’d you get into being the stats man? And do you need to research/refresh your memory much or can you pull it all out of your head?
Aaron Heap via Facebook
From one Aaron to another! I think it can be best described as one of those things that just developed over time – there was no grand plan.
I identified very early that there was a need and want for statistics and history relating to Supercars and the championship and set about building a lot of the content from scratch but also built upon the work of others and enhanced and built on top of the material they had produced over the years.
Part of it was to support my own commentary with information and that then grew into supplying such content to support other commentators, reporters and the broadcast on the whole, not to mention individual teams, sponsors and drivers.
I can pull some of it from my head, but we have a purpose-built database that houses the content, so better to dig it out of there to ensure it’s correct than rely 100 percent on my brain!
