Questions over robustness of Gen3 cars

Tickford Racing left the Newcastle 500 with the heftiest damage load of all of the teams with two of its four Mustangs finding the wall.

James Courtney ended up nose first in the wall at Turn 9 in the Shootout on Sunday, which marked the first major crash for a Gen3 car.

Delan Fraser then ended up in the pitwall at the start of Sunday's race after turning across the front of Macauley Jones.

The Courtney car was an interesting case study for the entire category given it was before the race and put the repairability of the cars to the test.

However the team's efforts to repair the car fell short when a new front clip, a new feature for the Gen3 cars, wouldn't fit to the control chassis.

That prompted suspicions that the central part of the chassis was bent from the impact.

Discussing the repairability of the car, Tickford CEO Tim Edwards said the early indication is that the clip system has weakened the chassis to some extent.

"Well, the ability to bolt things on would appear easier but it didn’t appear to be that big an accident and it’s obviously done a huge amount of damage, a lot of parts," he said.

"If it hasn’t transferred any of the load to the rest of the chassis that’s a positive that you’re now able to unbolt that front section, but on the surface you’d say that the car is weaker than it was before, so it’s a bit of a trade off.

"Last year you mightn’t have done any chassis damage even though you couldn’t replace it because it was all one assembly. You can replace it now but obviously it’s not as robust.

"Anyway, we need to have more accidents to really have a firm opinion on that."

The crashed front clip is now in the hands of Supercars for further investigation into the damage.

"Supercars have taken away that front clip – we gave it to them so they can analyse it and see where the material failed and where it tore," explained Edwards.

"Unfortunately you need to crash the things to understand exactly what the mode of failures will be. No different to the Car of the Future.

"As [COTF cars] evolved, wall thicknesses changed on tubes and things like that. But you’re sort of flying a bit blind, you don’t necessarily design a car to be crashed, so until you start crashing them you don’t know what the mode of failure is going to be."

Edwards added that Supercars was better placed than the team to undertake detailed analysis of the damage, given it will be up to the series to decide if changes to chassis design are required.

"Ultimately we didn’t design it, it’s more for the category to determine if it needs to be redesigned," he said.

"It may not, but they need to determine whether it needs different wall thicknesses or whatever. No issue with them taking it away because we can’t just say, ‘we need to make thicker tubes on our car now’, we don’t have that right with Gen3.

"They’ll analyse it. There’s a whole host of things they’ve got photos of and analyse. Unfortunately you have to have some crash test dummies to find these things out.

"I’d prefer if we weren’t the first crash test dummy."