V8 Supercars: 2014 Season preview

With the Clipsal 500 revving another V8 Supercars Championship into action on Friday (Feb 28), the essential question remains the same: Can any one stop Jamie Whincup and Triple Eight Race Engineering?

Whincup and T8, or Red Bull Racing Australia, have won five of the last six drivers’ championship and five teams championships, the last four in a row.

Just to rub salt into a raw wound for the rest of the field, Whincup and team-mate Craig Lowndes have finished one-two in the Drivers Championship the last three seasons. And this includes 2013’s turbulent first year of Car of the Future – a season  produced a record 13 different winners and a championship that was truly alive until the final event.

Arguably, personnel changes at T8 give the opposition a real hope Whincup can be unsettled. But most of the leading players have their own changes to contend with.

Indeed, with Will Davison shifting to Erebus from Ford Performance Racing (FPR), the list of bonafide rivals for the T8 duo has actually dropped by one from last year. But then maybe the reconstituted Holden Racing Team (HRT) can step up to the plate and take on T8. It has the drivers in James Courtney and Garth Tander to do it, but the consistency and outright pace of its Commodores is another question.

Things are much more settled in the second year of Car of the Future, which has now been renamed ‘New Generation’ by V8 Supercars. In 2013 there were new tech regs and the addition of the Nissan Altima and Mercedes-Benz E 63 AMG to the traditional Ford v Holden rivalry.

This year the big talking point is the arrival of Volvo.

Two S60s will join the championship run out of Garry Rogers Motorsport (GRM), rebranded as Volvo Polestar Racing. Scott McLaughlin will be lead driver with Swede Robert Dahlgren joining him.

Dahlgren’s signing was something of a surprise, but only one of many, many changes Australia’s premier motorsport category net through over a hectic summer.

CHANGING PLACES
The big shift over the summer was Will Davison’s move from FPR to Betty Klimenko’s privateer Erebus Motorsport.

Davison was replaced in the Ford factory squad by the emerging young star Chaz Mostert, who joined the main game part way through 2013 with Dick Johnson Racing (DJR) and won a race at Ipswich.

Will’s brother Alex has been replaced by Jack Perkins in the FPR ‘satellite’ Jeld-Wen Falcon run by Charlie Schwerkolt.

Alex no longer has a full-time drive, a fate that has also befallen Dean Fiore, Tony D’Alberto, Alex Premat, Maro Engel, Jonathon Webb and Tim Blanchard.

The latter leaves DJR, which has totally overhauled its drive lineup, with highly rated (and T8 owner Roland Dane-managed) Scott Pye swapping from Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport (LDM) and David Wall and his Wilson Security backing moving from Brad Jones Racing (BJR).

The evergreen Russell Ingall goes to a restructured LDM, while Dunlop development series champ Dale Wood joins BJR, returning to the main game after an unsuccessful foray with Kelly Racing for part of the 2009 season.

Ingall is replaced within the Walkinshaw Racing structure in the Supercheap Auto Holden Commodore VF by Tim Slade, while the organisation grows back to four cars, running rookie Nick Percat in an entry backed by transport company HHA. Both HHA and HRT’s new major sponsor, SP Tools, were previously at Erebus.

Despite the consistent failure of international drivers to adapt to V8 Supercars, Volvo Polestar Racing has signed Swede Robert Dahlgren for its debut season, joining Kiwi star Scott McLaughlin in the GRM-run S60s.

NUTS AND BOLTS BRIGADE
Four of the 2013 Championship top six have new engineers this year, which at least in the initial going could play a hand in the results as the new combinations learn about each other.

Some of the most important changes have been triggered by HSV/HRT owner Ryan Walkinshaw’s poaching of T8/Red Bull Racing’s team principal Adrian Burgess to become managing director of Walkinshaw Racing, which encompasses the factory-backed Holden Racing Team, Supercheap Auto Racing and a new entry for Nick Percat.

Burgess’ departure has prompted T8 team owner Roland Dane to promote Jamie Whincup’s engineer Mark Dutton to the role of team manager. This is significant, because Whincup and Dutton have been together through all five championship wins.

Dave Cauchi steps up from the role of data engineer to pair with Whincup.

Burgess in turn also swept a broom through Walkinshaw Racing, with senior personnel changes on every car except James Courtney’s HRT Commodore.

Former Walkinshaw boss Steve Hallam moves to Tekno Autosports to manage the unpredictable Kiwi Shane van Gisbergen’s campaign. SvG has lost his engineer Blake Smith to Walkinshaw Racing and is now with Dr Geoff Slater, who worked with team owner Jonathon Webb in 2013.

Another HRT refugee, Scott Sinclair, has moved to Nissan Motorsport to take over the general manager of racing operations role from veteran Rob Crawford. Pom Alex Somerset, who played a key role in developing the Altima’s controversial aero, moves the other way to work with Nick Percat.

At FPR, Mark Winterbottom starts his third straight season with a new engineer after the departure of the highly-rated James Small to NASCAR. Grant McPherson, who worked with Erebus draftee Will Davison, is now with Frosty.

Davison has been paired with relative newcomer Luke Mason.

DJR not only starts 2014 with a new driver lineup it has also reshaped its technical team under the highly rated veteran Campbell Little, who shifts there from FPR.

THE A-TEAMS
The tight financial times means the grid drops from 28 to 25 cars, with Dean Fiore (Triple F Racing), Tony D’Alberto Racing and Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport all handing Racing Entitlements Contracts (RECs) back in to V8 Supercars.

A REC is required to underpin a car on the grid. In the past, when the teams owned the V8 Supercar championship, the TV deal was more lucrative and sponsor income higher. Then A REC provided up to $800,000 in income per annum and routinely changed hands for over $1 million.

Nowadays they generate no dividend, which in tandem with a tightening sponsorship market in part explains the falling numbers on the grid.

Despite all this Walkinshaw Racing has expanded from three to four cars, with James Rosenberg moving his REC from Erebus to underpin a Commodore for Nick Percat. Erebus drops back to two cars as a result, leaving German Maro Engel without a season-long seat.

Tekno Autosports drops from two to one cars, with owner Jonathon Webb parking himself for at least 2014, while Shane van Gisbergen goes solo in the Triple Eight-built-Commodore backed by VIP Pet Foods.

After expanding to two cars in 2013, perennial backmarker LDM drops back to one car.

Garry Rogers Motorsport stays at two cars but becomes Volvo Polestar Racing and swaps its Holden Commodores for factory-backed Volvo S60s.

THE TOOLS ON TRACK
The arrival of Volvo S60 is the big change here and the biggest question will be the performance of Polestar-tuned narrow-angle B8444S engine in terms of outputs and fuel economy.

The Nissan Altimas get a revised aerodynamic kit in an attempt to improve high speed acceleration.

The Ford Falcon FG, Holden Commodore VF and Mercedes-Benz E 63 AMG have had no category-mandated performance changes for 2014. Instead, improvements will come from the teams beavering away, putting the lessons learned in 2013 into development for 2014.

The New Generation cars have a higher degree of control parts and less tuning ability than their predecessors, which helped explain why there were so many winners in 2013. It was hard to find the (winning) performance window if you weren’t somewhere near it when you rolled on to a track for the start of practice on any weekend.

With a bank of data and set-ups learned in 2013 expect that to be less of an issue this year, which could also mean a somewhat more predictable set of results.

As always, tyre management and qualifying near the front will be key to winning races.

IT’S A DATE
For the first time since 2009 there is no international event (discounting New Zealand) on the 2014 V8 Supercar calendar.

The circus was supposed to be heading back to Texas for a second year but the X Games got in the way. V8 boss James Warburton is promising a renewed international focus from 2015.

There are 14 championship events, plus the F1 support races at Albert Park, with Sydney Motorsports Park (nee Eastern Creek) returning to the calendar for the first time since 2012.

The season launches in a hurry with five events (including the F1 support races) between this weekend February 27 and April 27. It then slows through the mid-year before the usual rush to wrap things up in Spring and early Summer.

RACING LINES
After a taster at last December’s Sydney 500, V8 Supercars has decided to give Saturday twilight racing a big crack in 2014 in search of a boost in TV audience. Indeed, five events including the Clipsal 500, Gold Coast 600 and Sydney 500 will have twilight races.

That’s only part of a significant format overhaul in the wake of criticism that events had become too varied and confusing in format. In response to that three distinct categories of events have been introduced for 2014.

SuperStreet includes the Adelaide, Townsville and Sydney street races. Each will be conducted over 500km, with two 125km races on the Saturday and the traditional 250km mini-enduro on Sunday.

SuperSprint is the next category and will be contested over 400km with two 100km races on the Saturday and one 200km race (with fuel and tyre stops) on the Sunday. The SuperSprints meetings are the Symmons Plains (Tas), Winton (Vic), Pukekohe (NZ), Barbagallo (WA), Hidden Valley (NT), Ipswich (Qld), SMP (NSW) and Phillip Island (Vic) events. Note Pukekohe will include an extra 100km race on the Friday.

It’s worth noting that last year’s similarly named 60/60 Super Sprint experiment has been binned.

The Pirtek Enduro Cup returns for a second year, comprising the big end of year races: Sandown 500, Bathurst 1000 and Gold Cost 600.

More pit stop racing means more potential controversy over fuel economy like we had last year when the Nissan and Benz DOHC V8s proved thirstier than the Ford and Holden pushrods. However, V8 Supercars has ruled a specified amount of fuel must be taken onboard in the SuperSprint 200km races in search of economy parity between all five makes.

Friday practice interest is also going to be spiced up with a requirement for each car to set a green tyre time. With the tyre bank tight, many teams have been restricting themselves to used tyres on Fridays.

And intriguingly, the non-championship AGP races will be used to experiment with double file rolling starts and re-starts and be capped off with a double points finale.

Tomorrow: motoring.com.au’s 2014 V8 Supercar form guide

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