TRIPLE EIGHT boss Jamie Whincup has lashed out at Supercars over the category’s treatment of driver safety, amid efforts to appeal his team’s Newcastle disqualification.
The Red Bull Ampol Racing Chevrolet Camaros appeared to make the perfect debut with a 1-2 finish in the 250km Saturday race that opened the Gen3 era.
However, they were subsequently disqualified for running a dry ice cool box on the driver’s side of its cars, in breach of rules dictating such items be positioned on the passenger’s side.
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Triple Eight runs a ‘ChillOut’ electrical coolsuit system from the passenger side but added an additional dry ice box on driver’s right in Newcastle to feed cool air to the drivers’ helmets.
In the stewards hearing, Triple Eight manager Mark Dutton claimed that Supercars Head of Motorsport Adrian Burgess had approved the move on Thursday.
Burgess denied that was the case and the stewards ruled permission had not been granted, describing it as a misunderstanding.
Reacting to the development ahead of an appeal, Whincup – whose team designed the Gen3 chassis for Supercars and is Chevrolet’s homologation squad – was in a state of disbelief.
“We can’t believe the way we’ve been treated by Supercars,” Whincup told V8 Sleuth. “We’re not trying to sneak around the rules in any way, shape or form.
“We presented our cars, we got approval from the Head of Motorsport, we brought him into our garage and showed him what we were doing. He gave approval and we went racing.
“If anything it’s a disadvantage to the performance of the car not an advantage.
“It was only placed there due to the lack of time because of everything else we’ve been doing for Supercars to get these cars to the race track.
“We got approval, we haven’t broken any rule, (it’s) crazy, crazy, crazy, we just can’t believe the way we’ve been treated by Supercars.
“To throw two cars out of the results is completely, completely out of line.”
Cabin temperatures and driver welfare had already been a hot topic over the Newcastle weekend, with teams given permission to insulate their exhausts following complaints on Friday.
Triple Eight spearhead Shane van Gisbergen has been particularly vocal on the topic, describing his Gen3 Camaro as one of the hottest cars he’s ever driven.
“This is on top of Supercars’ complete lack of competency to keep the cabin temps under control and the driver safety at the forefront,” Whincup continued.
“They’ve showed a complete lack of competency in keeping our drivers safe, as we’ve seen in yesterday’s race.
“We offered plenty of advice before the round, most of it was scrapped through committee-based decision making.
“(The change after Friday) was a half-step a day before competition and we’ve been talking about this for weeks, months.
“The night before competition they make this rushed, half-arsed decision to go in the right direction.
“It was never a competent call on ensuring that our drivers were not going to be in the state they were last night.”
Others such as Erebus Motorsport’s Will Brown and Grove Racing’s David Reynolds have also visibly suffered with the cabin temperatures, while some have reported no issues.
Despite the Gen3 cars being largely made up of control components, Supercars does not have a uniform approach to driver cooling, with some teams using the ChillOut system and others the traditional dry ice.
Whincup said he would have preferred to use a second ChillOut system for the helmet air, rather than any dry ice.
“You need an additional Chillout system to do the driver’s air. There’s not enough in the country to go all through pitlane,” he said.
“We’ve had to adapt to a system we don’t even want, we don’t like dry ice, it’s not a preferred method, we want to get away from that. But it was unavailability.
“We never ran helmet cooling last year, we just ran the coolsuit, (the helmet air) was just ambient, but because the cabin temperate is so bad we’ve had to resort to something at the last minute just to keep the drivers alive.
“In an ideal world we’d keep the cabin temp under control so we didn’t need anything extra.”
Triple Eight changed the position of its offending coolbox at the circuit ahead of today’s qualifying and the second race.
“We were here until midnight last night when every other team was home in bed because of course we don’t want to be stubborn and say no we’ve got approval,” Whincup said.
“We did everything we could to move it over to the other side which meant we only had a few hours’ sleep.”
Triple Eight will also prepare for an appeal hearing, a date for which is yet to be confirmed.
“The stewards acted upon the information they had but they don’t have all the information,” Whincup added.
“They’ve only got a short amount of time to talk to a few people and come up with a decision.
“That’s why you have a right to appeal to have the opportunity to gather to right information to have the right finding.
“We’ve got no idea when that will be, but I know we’ve got four days to put our evidence forward, which will be pretty simple.”
