TRIPLE Eight Race Engineering team principal Jamie Whincup has had his say on the last-minute changes inflicted upon the Chevrolet Camaro Supercars.
It has become apparent that a downforce shift from rear to front has been agreed upon for the Camaro following testing last week at Temora, to help ensure balance between it and the Gen3 Ford Mustang.
It’s a change that is understood to have been well received by the Blue Oval.
Whincup was diplomatic about the matter today, albeit admitting to frustration surrounding delays in the homologation process and the need to pour extra resources into further testing.
“The ironic thing is the other side that wanted to go to VCAT and wanted to do further testing, the result is we’re actually now required to change our car,” he told V8 Sleuth.
“We’re not complaining, it is what it is.
“We recognise that Supercars have got a very tough job, we recognise that us making a change was probably going to achieve the best outcome; although it has created a lot more workload for us, we’re all for parity.”
Speaking further to that heightened workload, Whincup said: “Not only did we have to dedicate five of our staff members to three days away at Temora last week when we should have been building our own race cars, what has come of it is an adjustment to the front splitter.
“And then of course being the GM homologation team, we’re doing what we can to help all of the other GM teams to make sure they get the updates required as well.
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“So we worked all weekend and we’ll continue to work all week to represent the GM brand the best we possibly can.”
Whincup expressed pride at Triple Eight’s approach to the saga, as well as enthusiasm at now being able to let on-track performance do the talking with no lingering parity excuses.
“We’re proud of the way we’ve handled the parity/homologation testing,” said Whincup.
“We’ve done absolutely everything we can to help Supercars achieve what we all want to achieve and that’s parity between the two cars.
“Not at any stage have we tried to be better than the other side; we are absolutely committed to finding parity, not trying to make our car faster than another.
“Because when you don’t have parity, there’s absolutely no winners out of that scenario as we saw three or four years ago.
“We’re happy that we’ve got sign-off of the cars and now we can put it all behind us and go racing at Newcastle.
“We’ve got a fantastic product with two amazing brands: now it’s time to go racing.
“It’s going to be a huge relief to stop the committee discussion and actually just go racing as team versus team and to do what we all signed up for and just have fun trying to beat each other to the finish line.”
Round 1 at Newcastle gets underway with a trio of 45-minute practice sessions this Friday.
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