There might’ve been plenty of feel-good stories headlining the Darwin Triple Crown, but beneath the surface were roiling tensions over the season’s biggest gripe.
You had to look further down the classification sheet to see them — much, much further down.
Hidden Valley Raceway served Ford its worst weekend as a manufacturer for the season to date.
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No Ford car finished higher than third for the weekend, and on Saturday afternoon the best Mustang was 10th. It’s reportedly only the second time in the history of the Australian Touring Car Championship that a single manufacturer has swept the top nine places in a race.
Ford’s average best finish for the round was sixth, easily its lowest of the year.
Ford collected just one podium for the entire round. Sure, you could argue that Cam Waters was probably on track to convert from pole on Saturday, but it’s difficult to get around the counterargument that his car couldn’t go the distance without setting itself on fire.
It means that that a Blue Oval-badged car is yet to take the chequered flag first this season, with Waters’s Newcastle victory coming only after both Triple Eight drivers were disqualified for technical infringements related to the positioning of their cooling systems.
With those painful statistics brought to bear, the season-long simmering about parity finally boiled over in the tropical heat of the Top End.
“Five cars were able to lap at the same consistent speed here in Darwin, but not one of them was a Mustang,” Tickford boss Tim Edwards said in a Ford press release.
“Once again, we’re racing in the Mustang cup. The poor guys are driving the wheels off the cars and that’s not good for anyone.
“There are some standout teams on the other side, because they have beaten Triple Eight, but they are only racing against two-thirds of the field.”
Dick Johnson Racing principal David Noble said the series needed to reconvene to consider Ford’s concerns and reassess whether parity has been met.
“There’s got to be more discussions,” he told Speedcafe. “There’s more work to do. There’s no doubt about that.”
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THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE PARITY DISPUTE
There was a particularly interesting line in Ford’s volley of criticisms after Darwin.
“The parity keeps getting triggered constantly,” Edwards said. “It’s six or seven races now where we’ve hit the trigger.”
According to Speedcafe, the parity trigger is written into the teams racing charter and relates to a formula based on results and performance.
An analysis of the data from the first five rounds of the season paints a stark picture of Ford’s lost competitiveness.
Qualifying
Let’s start by comparing raw qualifying pace on like-for-like circuits — Albert Park, Wanneroo, Symmons Plains and Hidden Valley.
Average pace, 2022: Ford ahead by 0.149 seconds
Average pace, 2023: GM ahead by 0.342 seconds
Difference, 2022–23: GM improved by 0.491 seconds
The Camaro has resulted in an almost half-second turnaround in qualifying performance year on year compared to last season’s Commodore.
Unsurprisingly, that pace difference can be seen in the composition of the grid.
GM best qualifying position, 2023: 1.2 (2022: 2.8; up by 1.6 places)
Ford best qualifying position, 2023: 3.5 (2022: 1.3; down by 2.2 places)
Whereas this time last year the fastest Ford was qualifying 1.4 places ahead of the fastest Holden, this season the best Chevrolet is beating the best Ford by more than 2.3 places.
In effect that means last year the two manufacturers were likely to share the front row, whereas this season you’re more likely to get a Camaro front-row lockout.
The top 10 on the grid has also become more biased towards the Camaro.
Cars in the top 10, 2022: GM up 5.3 to 4.7
Cars in the top 10, 2023: GM up 6.1 to 3.9
Note that last season Ford comprised 36 per cent of the grid, while this season that number is up to 44 per cent.
Last year it was punching above its weight, whereas this season it’s underperforming.
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Races
The same trend is obvious in race results beyond the practically total clean sweep for victories.
For the purposes of this analysis, Triple Eight’s disqualification from the first race in Newcastle has been ignored to generate a truer representation of performance.
GM best finishing result, 2023: 1.0 (2022: 1.4; up by 0.4 places)
Ford best finishing result, 2023: 4.4 (2022: 1.9; down by 2.5 places)
You can see that expressed in the podium count after five rounds too.
Podium tally, 2022: Ford up 25 to 20
Podium tally, 2023: GM up 40 to 5
You won’t be surprised to read that Ford is also getting on average one car fewer into the top 10.
Cars in the top 10, 2022: GM up 5.5 to 4.5
Cars in the top 10, 2023: GM up 6.3 to 3.7
Remember that Ford represents 44 per cent of the grid, making that a particularly poor return on its numbers.
Average winning margin, 2022: GM by 2.126 seconds
Average winning margin: 2023: GM by 8.791 seconds (up by 6.665 seconds)
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Points
The top four positions on the drivers championship table are locked out by Camaro drivers, with Brodie Kostecki, Will Brown, Broc Feeney and Shane van Gisbergen spread across 110 points.
Chaz Mostert is the best-placed Ford driver, but he’s 179 points off the pace in fifth. There are only three Ford drivers in the top 10.
The story is much the same in the teams championship, where Erebus, Triple Eight and Brad Jones Racing occupy the top three spots.
Walkinshaw Andretti United is fourth and already 817 points adrift of the lead.
Points percentage after five rounds, 2022: 59.6 per cent to GM (Ford 40.4 per cent)
Points percentage after five rounds, 2023: 60.35 per cent to GM (Ford 39.65 per cent)
In a theoretical manufacturers championship in which only the best-placed driver of each marque scores points, the picture is clear, with Chevrolet holding a comfortable 315-point advantage.
Manufacturers championship, 2023: GM up 1500 to 1185 (2022: GM up 1414 to 1389)
Obviously the official champion manufacturer award, given to the marque that accumulates the most wins in a season, is being dominated by GM this year — just as it was almost single-handedly by Shane van Gisbergen in 2022.
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THE P-WORD
Parity was always going to be a major talking point this season given the total reset of the regulations for Gen3.
The first aero test with homologation teams Triple Eight and DJR was in October last year. Triple Eight, representing Chevrolet, was ready to sign off on the new cars shortly afterwards, but Ford wasn’t sold the two machines were equal.
The challenge to get the cars homologated lasted all the way through the off-season and pre-season testing.
Ford instigated a second aero test just over a week before the first race, which resulted in the Camaro having around five kilograms of downforce added to the front of it to address balance concerns.
Finally, at around 7pm on the Wednesday of the first race and less than 24 hours before scrutineering was due to begin, the cars were officially homologated, and the season got underway.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Concerns about centre of gravity came next, and testing was undertaken in early April to address them. Around five kilos of weight was redistributed higher onto the Camaro chassis.
Engine performance then came under question. Ford has suggested taking kilowatts out of its motor has detuned it to the detriment of driveability. Engine maps have been subject to regular tweaks all season, with particular regard for driveability and power delivery low on the rev range.
Now aerodynamics has come back into the spotlight, with Ford teams suspecting that the straight-line downforce tests conducted early in the year failed to identify potentially significant differences in cornering performance.
The common thread between all complaints has been the effect on traction and tyre consumption, which goes to the Mustang teams’ inability to compete for big points in races.
“There is a serious parity issue with the aero of the cars that needs to be addressed,” Grove boss Stephen Grove said. “We just cannot get any life out of our rear tyres.”
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IS IT REALLY ALL DOWN TO PARITY?
Of course the General Motors teams have been relatively quiet in this debate — and why wouldn’t they be when their perspective is that there’s nothing to talk about.
But that’s not necessarily such a flippant point of view despite what the raw data suggests.
GM teams point out, for example, that Ford squads have had breakout results this season, including poles to David Reynolds, Anton de Pasquale and Cameron Waters, but for a variety of reasons — operational or human error or bad luck — have failed to convert.
The argument that Mustang teams have simply underperformed is backed up by the fact that the Ford homologation team, DJR, has been arguably only the third-best Ford team this season when conventional wisdom dictates that it should least be first among the Mustangs.
And while several changes have been made to benefit Ford in pursuit of parity, the Mustang’s performance appears to have got worse relative to the best Chevrolet cars. If the differences were all about parity, you’d expect the gap to have closed at least a little bit.
To say the current state of the championship is all down to a failure of parity testing would be an oversimplification.
After all, while the purpose of parity is to theoretically give every team a chance to win on any given day, that’s obviously an unrealistic target. There will always be teams that operate on a higher level than others due to some inherent advantage or just because they’re in better form on a given weekend.
And we should take nothing away from the likes of Erebus, which has capitalised on the change of rules to come out of the blocks firing and secure a richly deserved place at the top of both championships.
Likewise maiden wins for both Team 18 and Matt Stone Racing at the weekend are to do with more than parity problems.
But Ford’s gut instinct is unlikely to be wrong, even if the degree of disparity is up for debate, and it’s already waved around withdrawal card as a theoretical nuclear option if it thinks it’s not getting a fair shake.
Things unlikely to get that far, but this issue at the heart of the Supercars series still has some way to go before the sport can confidently say it’s solved.
