Supercars has announced that Gen 3 will see an engine supplier dedicated to each manufacturer.
Currently, there are a number of different engines manufacturers through the field, with some teams designing and building their own.
Kelly Grove Racing, Tickford Racing, and Walkinshaw Andretti United all build their own engines, with WAU also supplying Erebus Motorsport.
Under the new regulations, KRE Race Engines will supply the Chevrolet Camaro teams while Mostech Race Engines will supply teams running the Ford Mustang.
Both companies already supply a number of teams under the current regulations, with Dick Johnson Racing using Mostech engines.
While KRE builds engines for Triple Eight Racing, and its customer teams, Team Sydney, Team 18, and Matt Stone Racing, as well as supplying Brad Jones Racing.
Supercars intends to buy engines from the suppliers, before then distributing them to the respective teams.
Supercars Head of Motorsport Adrian Burgess recently spoke to Speedcafe.com.
“First of all, we’ll obviously go through the process of those guys [KRE and Mostech] submitting engines to us,” Burgess said.
“We’ll run the pair of them alongside each other and partitise one against the other. We’ve got a couple of outputs we want to paritise like peak power, but then we’ve got things like torque, torque maps, we’ve got fuel consumption, we’ve got CoG (centre of gravity), we’ve got cost – all of those things we’ll paritise and make sure they’re very similar to each other.”
The new system is intended to be a cost reduction measure, something that has been a key focus of Gen 3 developments.
“But the rationale at this stage of using the two builders is this is all about saving money for the category and at the moment we’ve got five engine builders all building similar products. You just don’t get economies of scale. It’s harder to keep on top of reliability when you’ve got more than one person doing the same thing.
“The process will be that they’ll build their engines. We will have had an engine homologated then they’ll build the engines, they’ll give them to Supercars, we’ll do a final dyno check and just trim the last percent of power and then lock it. That engine will be locked and we, Supercars, will allocate. This engine will go there, this engine will go here, this engine will go there.
“All the GM engines and all the Ford engines, there’s just a pool of engines and Supercars will just allocate where they go into which car so there’s nobody believing they’ve got something better or worse than somebody else.
“That’s what’s been agreed on paper in meetings. Obviously we need to sit down and put some more detail around that. It’s just a level playing field for everybody in terms of the engine they receive.”
Main Image: Bill Briggs
