MOTORSPORT: 2019 Supercars pace puzzle

A Blue Oval whitewash could be coming up at the opening round of the 2019 Supercars championship in Adelaide on March 2-3, with all six of the new Ford Mustang GTs in the top 10 and the factory Holden Commodores mired way off the pace in testing at Phillip Island yesterday.

But just like pre-season footy tournaments, testing isn’t necessarily an accurate guide to who will be the pace-setters when the serious competition gets underway.

At Phillip Island on Thursday teams were running different programs, grappling with a variety of shared and individual issues and employing tyre banks that varied enormously in quality.

Almost certainly, the Mustangs won’t be this dominant on the streets of Adelaide and Holden stars Jamie Whincup and Shane van Gisbergen won’t be languishing.

In the end, it was Tickford Racing’s rising star Cameron Waters who led the way in the Monster Mustang – that’s a reference to the car’s sponsor not its controversial shape – thanks to a green tyre run right at the end of an eight-hour long testing session that bettered the race lap record but was well shy of the qualifying mark.

“[The Mustang] does some things well and some things bad,” Waters reported. “I think the things it does good are really good, but … if we fix those things where it’s not quite there yet … we’ll be really quick.”

With Waters’ three team-mates Chaz Mostert, Lee Holdsworth and Will Davison joining him in the top 10, the day was at the very least a morale boost for the former factory squad. It was off the pace in the final year of the Falcon FG/X in 2018, its struggles highlighted by DJR Team Penske’s epic championship triumph with Scott McLaughlin.

“The guys aren’t happy with how the cars are handling, so I take some encouragement from that actually,” said Tickford Racing team principal Tim Edwards. “If they hopped out and said ‘it’s perfect, it’s a jet’ well, where do you go from there? We’ve got some work to do.

“The most pleasing thing about today is all four cars ran faultlessly,” he added. “There were a few little gremlins here and there but considering the amount of effort the guys and girls have put in over the last couple of months to get these cars on-track I think that’s the biggest tick out of the whole day.”

McLaughlin was only eighth fastest, six spots behind team-mate Fabian Coulthard. He was less concerned about figuring out the aerodynamic changes from Falcon to Mustang than the impact of a new rule that bans trapezoidal springs in the name of cost containment and replaces them with linear springs and 20mm bump stops.

Teams have been running twin spring rear-ends for years, but the trend spread to the front of the cars, more recently triple-spring combinations have appeared and there is even talk of experiments with four springs per corner.

Essentially, the multi-spring arrangement delivers more tunablity on the entry, mid and exit phases of the corner. Get it all right and there are crucial speed and tyre wear gains to be made.

Get it wrong and a driver and his engineer can become lost in a sea of data and mechanics can spend their lives swapping springs in and out.

“[With] the twin springs you could overcome the problems you had in one part of the corner but now it’s more give and take,” McLaughlin told carsales.com.au. “I’ll ask for a bit more turn but then I get loose in the rear. So I give some of that turn back and get some more rear [grip] in return.

“It’s a trade-off and you have just got to try and drive around it. I really enjoy that.”

Triple Eight was at the forefront of trapezoidal spring development and team manager Mark Dutton acknowledged at Phillip Island that the shift back to linear springs was a contributor to the team’s pace.

“The cars are not in the window where we want them to be, so we aren’t happy with the balance,” said Dutton. “The linear spring and bump stops have been a big change for us. The way we ran the twin – or more – spring set-up was very non-linear.

“Going to linear we’ve had to come back further than some other people. Hence it will take a little bit longer to get our heads around it.”

But Edwards for one is sceptical of just how lost the factory Triple Eight Holdens actually are.

“I won’t say they were sandbagging, but I didn’t actually see them do a time where they went past the [timing] beacon with green tyres on,” he said. “I would suggest the times on the timesheet are not representative of their pace today.”

Linear springs weren’t the only item on the test agenda for all teams at Phillip Island. A new control Motec ECU was also running in some cars and will be mandatory for the entire 24-car field by Adelaide. The British Xtrac transaxle, which replaces the local Albins unit in service since 2013, was also employed as a production item for the first time.

The new ECU did cause some problems. Former Ford hero Mark Winterbottom’s first run on green tyres in his new Irwin Tools Holden Commodore ZB was blighted when the car got stuck in limp mode.

In its final year the Nissan Altima also had issues. Star driver and co-team owner Rick Kelly was the fastest member of the four-car squad in 13th place as engine upgrades and aerodynamic revisions were assessed.

“We never got to the point at the end of the day where we wanted to screw in fresh tyres and chase a lap time because we were still in the middle of our test program,” Kelly told carsales.com.au. “We learned a lot about the new car at Phillip Island, but it might mean something different at Adelaide for it.”

All cars entered in the 2019 championship ran at Phillip Island, but not all of them in their final warpaint. Andre Heimgartner’s Kelly Racing Nissan, Todd Hazelwood’s Matt Stone Racing Commodore and the two Garry Rogers Motorsport Holdens of James Golding and Richie Stanaway all ran in interim liveries.

Check out the picture gallery and tell us which cars you reckon look good -- and which ones miss the mark…