Untamed Mustang rampages in Supercars stable

It’s understandable if you’re losing interest in – or at least understanding of – what’s going on in the 2019 Supercars championship.

On-track it’s been a DJR Team Penske Ford Mustang white-and-red wash… Twelve races run as this was written and 10 race wins for championship leader Scott McLaughlin and his teammate Fabian Coulthard.

But it’s off-track where the confusion, disillusion and disagreement has really ramped up, much of it because of misunderstanding about fundamental Supercars technical rules. Maybe a few clari cations can help here. First off, Supercars are not based on production cars. They are built over the top of a control chassis and rollcage that dictates wheelbase, tracks and height.

That’s much of the reason – but not all the reason – why the racing Mustang looks so little like the road-going version.

To t the standard chassis and rollcage – which was designed for sedans not coupes – the Mustang’s exterior had to be narrowed, stretched and raised. In a rst for Supercars, not one body panel carries over from the production car.

Add to this, it’s important to understand who designed and developed this car.

DJRTP is the homologation team and it has some very smart people onboard. Team boss Ryan Story is a bona de genius – and as cunning as a shithouse rat. Then there’s Frenchman Ludo Lacroix, one of the nest touring car

engineers of modern times. And toiling away in the background is a guy called Nick Hughes, who is meant to be even smarter than the other two blokes when it comes to making racecars go fast.

These three – and several other brainiacs at DJRTP – gave the guidance to a mob called Ford Performance to do the heavy-duty design work. Based in Detroit, these guys are the Blue Oval’s racing shop. They design cars for NASCAR, world rally, rallycross, GT and sports car racing.

They know everything about making cars go fast – especially the black art that is aerodynamics. No car designed for Supercars has ever had this amount of racing smarts and cutting-edge capability poured into its design and development.

Next thing to remember; Supercars reserves the right to adjust the technical parity of the cars that contest the championship – currently the Mustang, the Holden Commodore ZB and the Nissan Altima L33 – if they think one has too much speed advantage over the others.

At this point it has to be stressed there is no targeting of individual drivers or teams in Supercars – like success ballast, where you cop more weight if you win. That’s called sporting parity.

The idea in Supercars is make the technical starting point for the three cars basically the same, and then let the teams and drivers sort it out from there.

And there’s no doubt McLaughlin is doing a brilliant job in both qualifying and the races and the team is backing him up superbly. They are both operating at a very high level, as Mark Skaife is wont to say.

But such has been the overall strong pace of the six Mustangs in the 24-car eld, Supercars has now made two attempts to slow it down.

First it mandated a centre of gravity rule after the Albert Park round. Under that rule the Mustang had to move 28kg of lead ballast from its oor to its roof and the Commodore 6.7kg. The Nissan was the baseline and was left untouched.

A mantra of motorsport designers and engineers is to build your car as far under-weight as possible and then use ballast to bring it up to the required weight. Placing the ballast as low as possible in the car improves handling.

Remember the Mustang shares no panels with the road car, so every panel is light-weight composite. Under the skin, the racing Mustang has been on a weight-watchers diet, with all sorts of tricks being employed to cull kilos and then reinstall them in all the right places.

You may have heard the DJRTP Mustangs was asked to replace extra-heavy mufflers that were, in effect, acting as ballast.

It’s estimated the Mustang was carrying around 50kg of ballast to meet the Supercars minimum weight of 1395kg. The Commodores were carrying around 13-14kg and the Nissans pretty much none.

Shifting 28kg to the roof is estimated to raise the Mustang’s CoG 20mm.

But CoG was only a starting point. Led by factory Holden Racing Team boss Roland Dane, the rest of the eld campaigned to have the

aerodynamic efficiency of the Mustang curtailed.

This brings us back to Ford Performance, which applied cutting edge Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) digital technology to shaping the Mustang Supercar – remembering AGAIN that the car was not restricted by using any standard body panels.

No manufacturer has ever put as much effort into the aerodynamic development of a Supercar as this one. It’s that simple.

Consider this quote from the engineer in charge of aerodynamics on the project, Sri Pakkam.

“This has been one of my most satisfying programmes because of how much freedom we’ve had on the shape of it.

“It’s different to a WRC or GT4 development where you are developing different bits on to it. This is more all-encompassing.

“It’s not about the widgets, it’s about the whole thing working.”

In other words, this is a body he’s effectively been able to create from the ground-up for maximum downforce and minimised drag – dual holy grails.

The car was signed off for racing after ninedays of technical parity aerodynamic testing against the Holden and Nissan. Those tests were lauded at the time for being the closest ever.

It’s a nice headline, but that testing is purely in a straight line and doesn’t include yaw (cornering) and that’s where the Mustang does its best work.

Supercars, after studying the data and some horse-trading with DJRTP, had a crack at trimming the Mustang’s aerodynamic efficiency ahead of the Perth SuperNight event.

The front undertray was cut 13mm from its rear edge and the gurney shortened from 13mm to 9.5mm. The endplate is reduced in size by 22 per cent.

The endplate is still the biggest of the three cars by more than 10 per cent, while the undertray is longer than the ZB’s but shorter than the Nissan’s. The gurney height is the same as the Nissan and the old Falcon FG/X.

The effect is less downforce – so the car should corner slower – but also less drag, so it should be faster in a straight line. Handy with Bathurst coming up soon.

What it all boils down to is this; Ford Performance and DJRTP have exploited the rules to build the best Supercar raced in Australia’s number one motorsport category.

It has also exposed Supercars’ testing and homologation regime to be inadequate. Wind tunnel testing seems to be the next necessary step, something the category has tried to avoid because it would mean the sizable cost of shipping cars off-shore, most likely to the USA, to do it.

But there seems no choice in the matter. It is the proud boast and belief of Supercars that it is the world’s best touring car championship. Given the processional, one-sided racing we’ve had so far in 2019 changes had to be made. More may still be required.