Triple Eight Race Engineering boss Jamie Whincup has revealed his relief after Supercars took swift action to address a technical imbalance between the Camaro and Mustang. In an exclusive chat, Whincup said that without intervention, the race weekend could have turned into a 'farce' detrimental to the sport and its fans.
The trigger was a pre-event change made by Supercars to the Camaro, which Ford teams claimed pushed Chevrolet outside the agreed 'parity box'. That change gave the Camaro excessive downforce, as evidenced by their dominance in all three practice sessions. Seeing this, Whincup, along with Grove Racing chiefs Stephen and Brenton Grove, held an emergency meeting with Supercars on Friday evening.
"I felt like we were about to get murdered, so I started the process with a simple, 'hey guys, I think you're about to murder us'," Whincup told Speedcafe. "Then when you don't get any action, you've got to escalate, but thankfully it never got to the point where we had to leave the discussion. If it needed to go further, we would have done that, but thankfully we could just sit down and have a good old-fashioned chat and nut it out."
Supercars responded by reducing the maximum permitted rear wing angle of the Camaros by 0.3 degrees on Saturday morning. This move is expected to cut some of the downforce gained from the previous change. Whincup welcomed the decision and praised Supercars for admitting the mistake and rectifying it. "They've realised this morning that is the case and they've made a change to get [the Camaro] into the parity box," he added.
The incident highlights how sensitive performance balance is in the Gen3 era, where Supercars has invested heavily in Windshear wind tunnel testing in the US to ensure parity. Whincup stressed that if his team loses this weekend, it won't be due to a lack of technical parity, but something else. "I confidently say that if we get beaten this weekend, it won't be because of lack of technical parity, it'll be something else, which is a very different scenario than 12 hours ago," he asserted.
There were also suggestions that Ford teams deliberately 'sandbagged' in practice to strengthen their parity argument. However, Whincup denied it. "We absolutely put in our best performance yesterday," he said. "It was telling about halfway through the session, Broc put on new tyres on really low tanks, and we got smashed by drivers that, generally speaking ..." (truncated).
With this change, the on-track competition is expected to be fairer and more exciting. Fans can look forward to tight racing without suspicious technical interventions. As Whincup put it, "They reacted to it and did the right thing for everybody for sport, the fans, the teams."
This decision by Supercars also sets an important precedent for the future, showing that dialogue between teams and officials can yield solutions without resorting to legal action. Whincup himself admitted he was ready to take legal steps if necessary, but is grateful it didn't come to that. "We could just sit down and have a good old-fashioned chat and nut it out," he concluded.
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