Supercars Gen 3 Mustang and Camaro are now delayed until 2023

As widely predicted, Supercars has elected to further postpone the deployment of their new Gen 3 Mustang and Camaro race cars until 2023, citing COVID-19 related delays.

When the new Gen 3 formula was first announced, Supercars intended to debut the new Camaro and reinvented Mustang at the start of the 2022 championship. That was then pushed out to a mid-2022 debut, before the final 2023 deadline announced today.

While the cars won’t debut until 2023, the covers will be pulled off of a pair of Gen 3 prototypes at Bathurst on December 3, giving fans their first proper look at the cars in the metal.

6

Images: Supercars

The Gen 3 cars will also follow the Supercars Championship on tour next year, performing on track demonstrations at each event.

Supercars CEO Sean Seamer says the reason for the latest delay with the Gen 3 cars is largely due to the demand the teams will now be under to finish off the 2021 racing season, which will see four consecutive weekends of racing at Sydney Motorsport Park before the finale at the Bathurst 1000 in December.

6

“They are going to be on the road from the end of this month, right up until Christmas when they go back to Queensland,” says Seamer.

"That takes them out of action and not able to do as much testing on the new cars as we would like, because we have to prioritise this season, and then going forward into next year.”

Triple Eight Race Engineering and Dick Johnson Racing are the main teams responsible for developing the new Gen 3 Camaro and Mustang, respectively.

6

We’ve gone in-depth on the specifics about the new Gen 3 cars before, but here’s a quick summary for those out of the loop.

The Gen 3 cars will be the biggest change in the Supercars category since the COTF (Car of the Future) platform which was first introduced in 2013. Unlike the existing COTF platform, the new Gen 3 chassis’ are designed to cater to a two-door coupe style layout over the outdated four-door chassis originally designed to suit Commodore and Falcon body skins. In a nut shell, the Gen 3 Mustang race car will actually look like a Mustang – not the oblong Frankenstein it is now.

6

Current Supercars Mustang

The other goals for the new cars is to decrease running and manufacturing costs (with increased safety), and a big part of that is the engines. Right now, competitors use highly-strung Ford and Chevy small-block V8s. Not only are they bespoke to the Supercars category and therefore very, very expensive – but they bare no relation to the engines fitted to their road-going counterparts.

So for Gen 3, both the Camaro and Mustang will be running modified versions of the engines actually found in the road car – hurrah! The Camaros will be slung with a 5.7-litre version of Chevrolet’s LT V8, while the Mustangs will use a bigger 5.4-litre version of the quad-cam Coyote mill.

Capacity is just about the only public knowledge on hand about how Supercars has addressed the parity between the two engines at the time of writing, but we do know the category is targeting 447kW (600hp) and 650Nm (480ft/lbs) from both powerplants.

Reduced aero packages will ensure the cars closer resemble the road going versions while also producing closer racing.

6

More details will continue to emerge about the new Gen 3 cars ahead of their official launch on December 3 of this year, and the 2021 Repco Supercars Championship will resume on October 29 at Sydney Motorsport Park.