MUSTANG PARITY ROW LOOMING

Ford Mustang parity row looming – Photo: Ross Gibb

Centre of gravity parity! That’s the call from rival Supercars teams following the sensational Adelaide debut by the Ford Mustang.

DJR Team Penske’s Mustangs took both pole positions and both race wins at the Adelaide 500 and a dominant Scott Mclaughlin emerged from the weekend with a perfect score of 300 championship points.

McLaughlin’s luckless teammate Fabian Coulthard was also a front-runner and all four Tickford Racing Mustangs showed significant single-lap and race speed.

It was enough to get the alarm bells ringing for rivals, who fear the first coupe in the Supercars era of Australian touring car racing has been built significantly light and cleverly ballasted to meet the 1395kg minimum weight rule.

At the back of rival team’s minds is the desire to avoid another expensive investment in weight reduction, as prompted by the Holden Commodore ZB last year, which arrived under-weight thanks to the extensive use of composite panels and parts.

Supercars is aware of those concerns and has been studying the equalisation of CoG for some time.

“We have made some inroads into trying to equalise it (CoG) as close as we can, but we have to bear in mind there is no rule written around this,”

Supercars head of motorsport Adrian Burgess said. “It’s easy for people to say ‘Let’s go CoG testing cars’, but it is a very expensive and complex process to go and measure a complete car accurately.”

Kelly Racing and Triple Eight Race Engineering – the homologation agents for each brand – are backing moves towards CoG testing after the arrival of the significantly different Mustang, something not lost on Triple Eight team boss Roland Dane, who has slammed the differences between the new model’s road-car counterpart.

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