Supercars confident in parity process with new Toyota Supra

Supercars is confident that its uprated parity determination process, after a busy past year in wind tunnels and on transient dyno, has created a clear baseline for its cars as it prepares for Toyota’s entry into the sport.

The Gen3 racers the track at the start of its first season with clear issues around the parity of the Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang, but intense aero testing at the Windshear facility in Concord, North Carolina, has provided both aero parity for its current cars and a clear map moving forward.

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Work is ongoing with the engines and the transient dyno testing at AVL in Detroit. Still, Supercars is not far from locking that away too, notwithstanding the current reliability issues for Ford.

Speaking with Auto Actions’s Bruce Williams at the Toyota Supercars launch, Supercars technical boss Tim Edwards said all the work has been done to enable a smooth introduction to the sport for Toyota.

“It actually gives us the exact blueprint of what we’ve got to recreate,” Edwards told AUTO ACTION of the two-step parity process. “We’ve been working with Dynamic, our aerodynamics partner, who worked with us at Windshear all year to get this right.

“They’ve helped with the styling of this car because they’ve been able to do the CFD study compared to the CFD of the other two cars. Now, yes, we’ve got to go back and actually put it in the wind tunnel as the final part of the test, but we’re going to be very close because Dynamic have been part of the journey to design this surfacing of this car.

“Because we’ve got that data and the same thing with AVL, we’ve now got accurate torque data, etcetera, from that to also match this Toyota engine up with the incumbents.

“And yes, we’ll have to go back and tick the box by going back to AVL to cross-reference everything, but it’s given us great information that we’ve never had in the past to, fingers crossed, literally hit the nail on the head with a car that’s got the same aero and the same engine as the incumbents.”

He says the 40% scale model of the car shown at yesterday’s launch is an accurate representation of what is being planned and not just a pipe dream drawn up in a design studio.

“Look, there’s some work going on, and we’ve got three different versions of the front of the car. If you took a snapshot of the glass house of the car the doors, the windscreen, the roof, all that is very close, if not exactly what we’ll see. But the front, we’ve got a lot of different versions going on there.

“Obviously, that’s been Supercars input, it’s been Dynamics input, it’s been in the design studio because obviously, from a Toyota point of view, they’re worried about making sure it’s got the right design cues.

“Then when Supercars and Dynamic get involved, we’re making sure that it actually has the right downforce and drag.”

A model of the Supra Supercar. Image: Glenn Hunt

Supercars and Toyota have completed all the work to date, but now, with Walkinshaw Andretti United getting involved as Toyota’s chosen homologation team (HT), it will get involved, too, as the front of the car is refined.

“That’s the biggest area that needs to be bottomed out because it’s the bit that licks the air first. When it comes to the wing, we know we’ve got a common wing element on these cars anyway, so that’s just a case of the exact position of it, forward, backwards, upwards, down, all those sorts of things.

“It’s the front that will still get some more work, and it’ll we’ve got the program so far and we had to do that behind closed doors. Now that Toyota has appointed Walkinshaw, there’ll be a point very soon when the whole thing will be handed over to them to take it from there.

“We’ve been working on this all year. Toyota literally selected them only recently. We’ve had to work it through with Toyota because the initial study was, ‘Well, have they got an engine?’ So, their first step was to go into a white paper and figure out exactly what was available because the program hadn’t been ticked off.

“We just had to push forward on our own to try and develop something just so that the program had been started. But ultimately, it’s no longer our responsibility; we just did the initial study and got the program to a certain point to make sure that they did have a suitable car and they did have a suitable engine and we also wanted to make sure that from an aerodynamic point of view we weren’t starting with something that potentially could never achieve similar downforce and drag numbers as the others.

“Once we’ve ticked all that off, which we have with Dynamics, it’s to the point now that it gets handed over to the HT because, ultimately, that’s not our responsibility.”

He said subtle tweaks were required to fit the silky-smooth Supra body onto the Gen3 chassis, but nothing major like the Gen2 ‘Frankenstein’ Mustang. Having seen the design study, we can confirm that the GR Supra Supercar remains true to the road car.

Edwards says this car was always in the back of the Gen3 development team’s minds, so right from the start of the process, it was always the Mustang, Camaro, and then Supra… plus others.

On the engine front, Toyota had a range of V8s in its arsenal to choose from, but it has steered away from the NASCAR engines used in the Cup Series and has opted for the hi-tech all-aluminium unit used in its Dakar-winning Hilux.

“This engine’s been raced in the past, but at the moment, we’ve got two engine concepts that we’ve been working on,” he said when questioned on cubic capacity and the like. “It’s got variable cam timing on the inlet cams, so there are a lot of similarities to the Ford, I suppose.

“Capacity is one of the things that we’re working on at the moment, and as I say, we’ve got the program so far, but ultimately, it now gets handed over to the HT to take it further. There’s a chance it’ll be similar in capacity to the other two.”

Stay tuned to the Auto Action website as the day goes by for more specific stories about the Toyota Supercars announcement, and don’t forget to listen to the Auto Action RevLimiter Podcast to learn what it means.

By Bruce Williams with Andrew Clarke

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