MOTORSPORT: Holden slams Ford Mustang

The victorious Ford Mustang Supercar has been blasted as a threat to the integrity of Australia’s premier car racing category because it looks so different to the production model with which it shares its name.

The source of that criticism is the boss of the factory-backed Red Bull Holden Racing Team Roland Dane.

“The car is such a departure from the road car, it is not what Supercars set out to be,” he told carsales.com.au at last weekend’s Adelaide 500 championship opener.

“The DNA of these cars is really important in the way they look.”

While Supercars have veered technically further and further away from the road cars they are based on, it has been a cornerstone of the category that they look as stock as possible and that’s the principle Dane is arguing the Mustang has breached.

“Even if we make composite panels — which we increasingly have over the years for one reason or the other, often as not cost — we have kept the essential dimensions of the road car. That has maintained the look and feel,” Dane said.

“Now we have a sports sedan and I don’t feel it’s built with the best interests of the category in mind.”

Dane said “several things” about the Mustang Supercar were concerning and argued it didn’t stick to the category’s development rules his team had used in developing the Holden ZB Commodore that debuted in 2018.

“We followed the guidelines that were published several years ago … we were told they were rules and now we are told they are not rules.

“But we were told they were rules so we followed them.”

All that helps explain his reference on TV last Sunday to “engineering the unfair advantage” and dealing with that.

The Mustangs of homologation team DJR Team Penske took both pole positions and won both races last weekend, defending Supercars champion Scott McLaughlin emerging with a perfect 300 points from the event.

While McLaughlin was supreme when it came to sustained race pace, teammate Fabian Coulthard and the four Tickford Racing drivers also ran competitively in their new Mustangs and would have posted better results if not for a series of driver and team errors.

While not able to hang with McLaughlin, Dane’s two drivers Shane van Gisbergen and Jamie Whincup managed three podiums across the two races in their ZB Commodores, and van Gisbergen lies second in the championship behind his New Zealand compatriot.

Dane’s angle of attack is more oblique than might be expected, but politically it’s the safest way to keep trying to unsettle his opposition.

While the obvious approach would be to suggest an imbalance in the technical parity formula Supercars uses to create even racing, that’s a difficult road to go down so early in the season. Dane knows more race results are required before a quantifiable trend appears.

As a leading team owner and former Supercars board member it would also be a bad look to be rubbishing the category’s parity rules.

Dane also remembers how the Ford and Nissan teams criticised the new ZB in 2018 and lobbied for concessions such as light-weight panels as compensation.

“I am not going to do what they did last year,” Dane said. “It was demeaning for them and demeaning for the category and self-serving in a way that is destructive in the sport.”

So, Dane is focussing on the appearance of the Mustang, which has been compromised by the higher roofline the Supercar requires to fit over the standard category rollcage.

Even then he has to be cautious about his comments because Supercars team owners had the chance to allow a modification of the rollcage to help the Mustang racer’s shape back in 2017 when it was first being designed.

That was knocked back because no-one wanted to hand the Ford teams a potential performance advantage that would then require the rest of the grid to go through the expense of modifying their own cars.

So instead of focussing on the glasshouse, Dane’s criticisms of the look centre on the position of the grille and headlights in relation to the windscreen. The depth of the side skirts is known to be another concern RBHRT has with the Mustang.

“Don’t confuse the chassis structure and maybe having to compromise the glasshouse with the front of the car,” Dane told carsales.com.au.

“The front of the car has nothing to do with the glasshouse. The [Mustang] NASCAR looks more like a road car than that does.

“Supercars shouldn’t have allowed it but the team shouldn’t have tried to do what they have done … both Supercars and the team should have done a better job of sticking to the DNA of Supercars.

“Even if it meant redoing the rollcage and finding a way to make sure we had the centre of gravity in the right place and all the rest of it we should have done it.

“So, I am disappointed by that, but that’s a different question to parity. Parity will be what parity will be and we’ll see as we go through the next few races whether we have parity or not.”

And now the reply...

https://www.motoring.com.au/motorsport-ford-fires-back-at-holden-117342