Ford's Supercars dyno wish explained

Work to paritise the Ford and Chevrolet engines is ongoing with a number of mapping changes in play again for the Tasmania SuperSprint this weekend.

The Ford teams will trial two different maps across practice with different shift cuts and camshaft mapping before deciding on one that will be used across all Mustangs for the competitive sessions.

The Chevrolet teams are also expected to experiment with different shift cuts in practice before the recovery time will be standardised for qualifying.

So far this season the Camaros have been racing with a 105 millisecond shift recovery while the future has been 50 milliseconds for the Mustangs.

That, however, is seen as a bandaid solution to what appears to be a torque delivery issue with the Ford.

There is hope from teams that the two very different units – a 5.4-litre, quadcam Ford and a 5.7-litre pushrod Chev – can still be paritised to a point where both engines will have the same shift recovery.

And the key to that being found could be a proposed transient dyno testing programme.

Both units spent time on transient dynos in the United States during durability testing, however it was on different, manufacturer-owned dynos and not in a controlled environment.

A static dyno in Australia was then used to assess parity between the units based on the Accumulated Engine Power system.

Ford has since argued that, while AEP has been equalised, that isn't enough to create parity between two entirely different motors.

As such it has proposed a transient dyno test, which Supercars is now assessing.

A suitable unit is available at DS International in Melbourne.

According to Tickford Racing CEO Tim Edwards, a more comprehensive dyno test would provide much-needed transparency to teams and greatly help the pursuit of parity.

"The transient dyno is more about the validation tool to ensure we have got parity between the engines," said Edwards.

"I suppose the best way to describe the dyno that they're using at the moment, compared to a transient dyno, is when you started primary school you had a calculator with 10 digits on it and a plus and a minus button. When you finished university, you had a scientific calculator with a lot more buttons on it.

"Really, a transient dyno is just a far better tool to validate the engines. That will tell us if there is a difference [or] if there's not a difference.

"We have got, for the first time in the history of the sport, two engines that are different capacities, different architecture and they are very close... but are they exactly the same? I don't know.

"We need to do that testing and put it to bed and not talk about it ever again.

"We know there was great transparency at the aero test at Temora and we all walked out of that, hand on heart, yep, we've got transparency here. I think we just need a bit more information [on engines], then we can put it to bed.

"The transient testing by Ford in the US, and I believe by GM as well, was durability testing. That's the best way to do 10,000 [kilometres] of real world [testing]... because you've got the transaxle on it, you're going up and down the gears, you simulate going around the track.

"[The two engines have] not been on the same transient dyno. The Ford stuff was done on their's and I don't know where the GM was done.

"The [DS International] dyno has been in Melbourne for some time, but nobody was aware of it until two months ago. But it is a very new, state-of-the-art dyno that's at an engineering facility and available for use."