New Ford V8 Supercar in 2008

THE next-generation Ford Falcon could be banging door panels with the VE Commodore on the race track by midway through the V8 Supercar season.
Brisbane-based Triple Eight Race Engineering has been working on parts and panels from the Falcon, codenamed Orion, for the past year and hopes to have a full shell available for testing some time after April.

Falcon’s powertrain and running gear will be unveiled to the Australian media on February 6. The vehicle is “on target” for a public unveiling at the Melbourne Motor Show in March and it is tipped to be on sale as early as March.

How soon it lines up on the V8 Supercar grid will be largely the responsibility of Triple Eight which has been chosen by the Ford teams as their representative to homologate the car for racing.

According to Triple Eight team principal Roland Dane that means hours and hours of work.

“But there shouldn’t be any dramas,” he said. “We’ve had bits and pieces for a long time now. We’ve done wind tunnel tests on some parts, but we don’t work with the hard panels so much as the design. It’s mainly done on computer. I don’t think it will be a difficult task, but it will be time consuming.”

He would not reveal the cost or the number of hours it would take.

“But it’s not particularly cheap because it is so time consuming,” he said.

V8 Supercars requires the Falcon and Commodore race car bodies to have equal aerodynamics before they can be accepted for racing.

“We have to do back-to-back tests for parity,” Dane said. Only the body shells from the road-going cars are used on the race cars. “Everything else is bespoke racing parts,” he said.

Triple Eight has been the Ford homologation team for a couple of years, while the Commodore is done by the HRT team.

“They might look fairly different cars but they are both basically four-door sedans,” Dane said. “We might have to chip something off here and add something on there, but the basic (Orion Falcon) shape will remain the same.”

There are also some parts from the current cars that will not be changed.

“The under side of the front splitter will be the same as the current Commodore and Falcon shells,” he said. “There will be a few carry-over parts. The rear wing also will be very similar.”

However, the basic integrity of the Orion shape, which includes a more muscular rear end, narrow headlights, a rising waist-line, large intakes, swooping roof line, flared guards and a sleeker front, will be integrated into the V8 Supercar styling.

The Orion is expected to reflect Ford’s new “kinetic styling” approach, first seen in Australia in the Mondeo.

So what does Dane think of the new Orion, which he has seen in its complete form.

“I think it looks good. They have done a very good job,” he said.

Dane could not say where or when the new car would be tested. Last year the aero testing was at Woomera in South Australia.

“There are two homologation dates in the season. One at the start of the year and one in the middle of the year,” he said. “Clearly it won’t be ready for the start of this season, but it could be ready midway through or at the start of 2009. I’d love to be racing it this year but the rules specify any new model must be available to any Ford team so there are logistical issues to take into account.”

The Bathurst-winning Triple Eight partnership of Craig Lowndes and Jamie Whincup returns this year, hoping to go one better in the championship after second spots in the past two seasons.