Bathurst winners FPR slam rumours of Ford withdrawal from V8s

Ford Performance Racing have rubbished rumours that Ford are about to leave the championship, as reported by one of the national press this weekend ahead of the team’s reveal of their Ford Falcon FG X V8 Supercar programme for the 2015 season.

The team, which fields four cars for Mark Winterbottom, Chaz Mostert, David Reynolds and Jack Perkins in this year’s championship, and won its second consecutive Bathurst 1000 yesterday from the back of the grid, have confirmed that negotiations with Ford are still in progress and that the team fully expects to continue with its relationship with the US-based manufacturer in 2015 and beyond.

“We’ve made no secret of the fact that we’re still negotiating with Ford, and Ford will say the same thing, we are negotiating, and we will be supported by Ford next year, to what degree?, that will never be made public anyway,” said FPR team principal Tim Edwards to TouringCarTimes.

“Nobody knows whether we get $1 today or $10 million, all these things are commercially confident, but once we’ve finished the negotiation process, both parties will be saying we are together.

Edwards adds that manufacturer support isn’t vital to every team on the field in the current state of the championship, with powerhouse teams such as Triple Eight and Walkinshaw Performance as well as FPR supporting teams on the grid, regardless of manufacturer status or backing.

“The category’s always had teams that aren’t manufacturer supported. Look at Dick Johnson Racing, they’re not manufacturer supported but they’re able to be fairly competitive because I provide them with everything. They buy all their parts off us, and at the end of the day we provide them with set-up information, so they know exactly where Frosty broke and all that kind of data, so you don’t necessarily need to have manufacturer support. What that enables them to do is they don’t need a design team or a manufacturing team as I provide that service.

“Of course you’ve got to have a number of teams at that level to support the category, but I sell parts to many other teams in this pit lane that we don’t we really talk about because they’re not the same marque, but I’m still selling parts to a lot of cars on the grid.”

In terms of the commercial arrangements at FPR, Edwards stresses that unlike rivals Holden, the Ford ‘factory’ programme has always functioned with a different level of financial and commercial support from the Blue Oval

“You’ve only to look at this team, with Pepsi Max, with Castrol, these team has always been heavily commercially supported irrespective of the manufacturer. We’ve never been like HRT, which is largely a manufacturer funded team, which has enabled them to have big lions’ heads on the side of the car. We’ve never been able to do that as we’ve had to generate our own support. Ford are a much smaller partner than some of our other sponsors, so it’s not as though we’re locked in and if we don’t have support of a manufacturer the wheels will fall off the car, we do have a lot of other commercial partners, but saying that, we will be supported by Ford.”

FPR revealed the design concept for their next V8 Supercar at Bathurst, based on what will be the final Ford Falcon produced in Australia, before Ford ceases manufacturing operations in Australia which is set to spell the end of the iconic Falcon name.

“We’ve been working on it for four months, and it’s always been our intention to tell the world this weekend that we’ve been working on it, but then some other speculative stories appeared,” said Edwards.

“It’s been a big task, I’ve had six engineers working on and some contractors as well, at the moment it’s been about 2,000 hours of work, so it’s been a fairly big project, it might look only subtly different, but there’s a lot in the changeover.

The glasshouse remains still the same from windscreen to windscreen, and part of what you’re doing is not just putting the surfaces on the car, you’re working through the CFD programme to optimise it, and match what we’ve currently got. “