Opinion: Supercars at a crossroads – UPDATE: Ford speaks

For as long as I can remember, the Bathurst 1000 has been Christmas, Easter and my birthday all wrapped up in one event. It’s my grand final, my indulgence, my must-do.

Not this year.

For a multitude of reasons, and in what should have been its finest hour, Supercars has managed to screw up the roll-out of the third-generation car so comprehensively that the entire paddock is at war, literally a day before opening practice for 2023’s blue riband event.

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The short version is that the introduction of the new Chevrolet Camaro and Ford Mustang was based on a premise of performance parity between the two brands.

So far, the season has been a sea of red, with Camaro-equipped teams almost clean-sweeping the season to date. And, given the nature of the fast, flowing Mt Panorama circuit, it looks set to continue.

But a twelfth-hour attempt by Ford-shod teams to ram through a parity tweak has descended into farce, with a come-to-Jesus meeting set down for the day before official practice begins.

It could even involve lawyers. Cue a huge eye-roll.

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At the heart of the overly complex (and largely uninteresting) wrangling is the fact that while the timing sheets suggest the field is relatively close together, it’s the on-track performance of the Mustang that shows it up best.

Before a small on-the-run tweak for the Mustangs ahead of the Sandown 500, for example, they were running laps up to a second slower than the Camaros.

Now, Ford – spearheaded by an increasingly disillusioned head office presence in Dearborn, Michigan – are loudly demanding a fix, which essentially equates to a brace of stick-on bits for the front bumpers, be put in place ahead of the Big Race.

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The Chevy squads – led by Triple Eight Engineering – are pushing back hard, though, claiming that the conditions for a Supercars-imposed parity review haven’t been met.

For Pete’s sake, guys… get it together.

The positive spin from Supercars has been strong, but the facts remain… the rollout of the gen-three Supercar has been a PR disaster to this point. And it can trace its origins to the car’s inception.

Put simply, too many cooks in the Supercars kitchen have taken what should have and could have been a relatively affordable, universally backed and spectator-friendly machine, into what insiders wearily call a ‘Supercar by committee’.

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They are expensive to build, a horror show to repair in a hurry and – given the rancour that currently permeates the paddock over the dreaded ‘p’ word – a long way apart in actual on-track performance.

Defending – and departing – champion Shane van Gisbergen has publicly called the racing “mind-numbing”, while senior drivers have been reportedly muzzled in their criticisms by Supercars officials.

Add in the fact that the carry-over tyre package is hopelessly mismatched to the current car (and stuck as it is until 2024), and the 2023 Bathurst 1000 is shaping up as an already-run race in favour of the Camaro teams.

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All this wrangling and back-and-forth didn’t need to happen. Every racing series on the planet goes through the same technical boom/bust cycle, where the better-funded squads lead an arms race that takes the category down a path where only a few can compete.

The gen-three Supercar was originally designed to do away with a brace of compromises that came with the second-generation car, in terms of awkward body shapes and expensive underpinnings.

What it’s done, though, is produce its own set of dramas; poor rear tyre life which leads to processional racing, cost blowouts to cater for late-stage design changes, untested patches for potentially dangerous problems. (See Garth Tander’s wheelnut failure at 260km/h at Sandown, or the steering rack dramas experienced across the paddock) and increasingly disgruntled fans.

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Of course, a new car needs time to bed in with both drivers and teams… but we’re now seven months into the season.

The social media space is already heaving – and while it’s always good to take this stuff with a healthy pinch of salt, Supercars really needs to read the room on this one.

Crowd numbers are expected to be solid at the Bathurst venue as always, but it will be interesting to see how TV ratings fare, post-event.

The new Supercar is more than capable of producing good racing – the night race at Sydney Motorsport Park was an all-time belter – but enough with the petty parity squabbles.

Get out from behind the boardroom desk, put the bickering aside and work together for the future of the sport.