So the much vaunted Car of the Future is here in V8 Supercar land. The Nissan Altima and Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG cars made their debut at what is widely agreed as the toughest race weekend of the year, joining the new cars from Ford and Holden.
Conventional wisdom is that all the teams (including thew newly formed Nissan and Mercedes-Benz crews) together with the technical experts behind the COTF regulations did a brilliant job, and the racing was fantastic.
I find myself unable to agree on several fronts.
For sure there were some highlights. I loved seeing the likes of Shane van Gisbergen and Fabian Coulthard running fast and up front, both Brad Jones Racing and TEKNO Motorsport have done great work.
And then there’s the nice work from the Fujitsu Racing GRM squad of Scott McLaughlin and Alexandre Premat doing a solid job. You’d want to see McLaughlin going quicker than Premat pretty consistently, Premat didn’t show too much promise last season.
Beyond that the pickings, in my opinion, are slim.
I think the events of the weekend give every appearance that the COTF cars weren’t ready, were under-tested and in many cases under-prepared.
When control components like the new transaxle fail on multiple cars, that sends warning signals.
When FPR have wheelnuts/axles fail on all three cars, that’s poor preparation (and if it was the control components – why did it only affect FPR? and why only Sunday?)
And then there’s the reality that only 888 Racing built cars were remotely competitive in race trim. Sure FPR bagged a couple of front row starts, but in race trim it didn’t look to me like anybody could hang with the 888 build chassis.
And the new boys? Both the Nissan and Mercedes-Benz cars look fantastic, both sound fantastic, both are slow. The Merc’s in particular look well down on power and just not ready to go racing.
So what are we left with? One group of dominant cars, , everyone scrambling to catch up, worrying niggles about the reliability of control (and therefore compulsory) components that seem to randomly fail, and the much vaunted new manufacturers destine to prop up the rear of field (maybe until we get to some non-horsepower tracks?).
And the commentary team? Great technical detail, light on the capacity to critique under-performing teams and tell it like it is. We spent the whole weekend being told what an amazing job had been done to get 28 cars on track…while watching car after car fail and drop out. That’s probably the price for trying to be mates with everyone up and down pit lane (except the Giz who seems to have been dumped by all!). I found the guys also missed the mark on helping us keep track of how the race was unfolding…how did Lowndes suddenly get a 15 second lead? No idea!
There’s lots to like about the year ahead, but for mine the weekend was a little short of a complete success.
We’re hoping to bring some occasional opinion/commentary on V8 and F1 series this year – just for fun. Your comments and responses are most welcome!
Scott
What you say is quite true Scott,but it opens up another can of worms….should there be more test days for the new cars?One thing that came through quite clear from many of the drivers was they were going into the unknown…many had only limited laps in the car and most of them on a track not a road course.The powers that be in my opinion should have made more test days avaliable…hope they do this before the next round
I agree that the weekend was a little short of being a success. I’ve never been a huge V8 fan under the guise of the previous format of 2 makes. The biggest memories I have are of the 635 JPS BMWs, Jags, Skylines racing door to door. I watched only parts of the weekend racing to get a bit of a flavor of things to come.
The supercar calendar has always been a big jam packed affair. Mainly to cash in on ratings, sponsorship. I have no problem with that, but more KMs testing would have helped many I’m sure, but also cost teams a lot of money. My understanding of the new formula was to help teams reduce cost in the current climate. Mind you as the 888 team showed, the better equipped and experienced teams will always do a good job regardless.
I see that the F1 drivers mileage over all testing was recently released. Ranged from 2700km to as low as 75km, with an avg of around 2300km. It would be interesting to see what Nissan, Merc and co did get to do in the off season.
I like that we had some different names up front. Yes, some of that was achieved off the back of failure by others due to lack of prep etc, but that does make it interesting. All the teams will be better off after this weekends hit-out.
I believe in the most part the weekend racing should a lot of potential. Yes they have issues to address, but they are headed in the right direction.
I don’t usually watch V8 racing, not enough cross branding for my liking, but I did have some minor interest in the new format, though it still seems so geared to Ford vs Holden, other brands really do seem a token effort at this stage, with the money behind Folden, will we ever see anyone major driving anything else? (Though I have no idea who anyone way in general, so maybe Nissan have someone?)
What I found odd was race direction on Friday, I tuned in for Stoners race, only to see a weird false start with flashing amber that the first few cars took off on, then the rest of the field went when the reds went out, waited for something to be done about that, nothing was.
Then Stoners car was left on track after his problem/crash, and for the last 3 or so laps nothing could happen cause yellow flags were up on the main passing corner, weird stuff.
I too was not so impressed with the overall COTF first weekend. I did not mind all the chassis being the same but could not believe the motors all have to have the same maximum power and RPM.
Obviously the Falcodores with their pushrod technology have been running this setup basically for the last 20 years. The new teams engines both have over head cams and are used to making power with RPM.
I believe it will be a long expensive road for Nissan and Merc to develop engines with the low down torque needed to keep up with the likes of 888. So we are back to Ford vs Holden
At least reliability should come for the second half of the season.