NO SILVER BULLET FOR WALKINSHAW

No Silver Bullet for Walkinshaw

THERE’S NO quick fix that will cure Walkinshaw Andretti United’s latest slump.

By BRUCE NEWTON

That’s the stark message from the struggling Supercars team’s technical director Carl Faux.

The Englishman, who oversaw a lift in performance from WAU in 2018, is now leading an engineering team trying to recapture that form in 2019.

The stats make grim reading. In 12 races Scott Pye and James Courtney have managed to qualify eight times in the top 10 and finish there eight times between them in their Mobil 1 MEGA Racing Holden Commodore ZBs. Courtney is 14th in the championship and Pye 18th.

“There’s never a magic bullet,” Faux told Auto Action. Every circuit we go to requires a different characteristic and at the minute its plain to see we haven’t got that characteristic right for every circuit we go to despite being quick on occasion.

“That’s the problem, the operating window we are working with.”

WAU has been impacted by the shift from the trapezoidal to the linear spring, combined with the lift in performance of Tickford Racing, which has used the new Ford Mustang to vault past it on the performance ladder.

But WAU has also struggled to hold its own against the Commodore ZBs, only once qualifying top Holden in 2019. It currently sits eighth in the teams’ championship after finishing fifth in 2018.

At the Perth SuperNight, Pye looked on course for a top 10 finish until a clash with Andre Heimgartner put him out. But Faux played down what appeared to be stronger form.

“I am not going to celebrate what might have been a seventh place, it’s not good enough.”

Faux, who left a glittering career in the British Touring Car Championship to join the Supercars championship, was starkly honest about the search for WAU’s pace.

“If I knew what the problem was there wouldn’t be a problem,” he said. “I guess I am arrogant enough to say if you ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to I will say ‘I don’t know, but I will go and work it out’.

“That is what I am going to do. I am going to work it out.”

Faux said the search for a solution made the task of extracting speed more challenging for the drivers.

“Every time you go out on circuit and you are trying to fix some issue – which the end issue is not being quick enough – you are trying something. Which means the cars are never the same for the drivers underneath them, which means they are always having to drive to what they have got.

“It’s not a consistent way, and that way when you are searching for performance is always going to be a step behind.

“So it’s just part of it.”

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