2020 Supercars engine changes signed off

The Supercars championship organisation has today announced measures to reduce costs in the series from 2020 through changes to the maintainence and control parts in the engines of the series.

With 24 races down in 2019, only those from factory-backed teams have won races with the Ford Mustang, campaigned by DJR Team Penske and Tickford Racing, and the Holden Commodore, run by Triple Eight Race Engineering, sharing the silverware at the top of the podium.

To decrease costs across the field and tighten up the competition, Supercars will be implementing the use of a control ring and rocker ratio in the engines, as well as limiting engine rebuilds to three per car per season.

Through the changes, peak horsepower is expected to drop by 15bhp, something which Supercars’ Head of Motorsport Adrian Burgess believes will help take stress out of the engines and let teams achieve the limit of three rebuilds in a season.

“There wasn’t a single team doing under four rebuilds and it was a sort of easy objective for us to try and get that down to three,” Burgess said.

“The easiest way for us to do that equally for everybody was to change the rocker and ring package.

“That will lose approximately 14, 15 horsepower equally for everybody. And it’ll just de-stress the engine a little bit.

“Part of the thing the teams were doing, they all migrated to a really expensive ring package that gave them two horsepower. But it actually degraded a lot quicker.

“We’re not re-inventing the wheel or anything, we are going back to an older ring package for everybody. It’s $390 as opposed to $2,000 a set.

“It’s really a no-brainer for everybody, and a very effective way for us to take some stress out of the engines and allow them to stretch them a little bit further than they are.”

While not finalised, Supercars is also looking at a change to the aerodynamics package to improve the racing in the category, potentially dropping downforce by 15% which will allow drivers to fight closer on track.

The move to a reduction in downforce will come through testing in the off-season with Supercars wanting to avoid a repeat of this season where changes to the aerodynamic packages on the Ford Mustang, Holden Commodore and Nissan Altima to ensure parity have resulted in an overall increase in downforce and arguably made it harder for cars to pass each other.

Burgess says the changes will be minimal initially and will set up the possibility of a larger cut in downforce moving forwards.

“We’ll take a small amount of downforce off the cars,” he said.

“Long-term, it might be something that we look at more rigorously, and take a larger amount away.

“But at the moment we’re going to do it in such a way where we’re not creating teams that go and design new this, and new that, and new this.”