Walkinshaw Andretti United confirm talks with “a couple of new manufacturers”

Walkinshaw Andretti United has confirmed it continues working on bringing a new manufacturers to the Supercars Championship in 2022.

“We’ve now got new negotiations ongoing with a couple of new manufacturers,” said Ryan Walkinshaw, team co-owner to the Loud Pedal podcast.

“It’s very early stages, but I’m pretty encouraged by the positive signs we have, but that would be more of a 2022 programme, at the earliest.”

Walkinshaw states that the team had two manufacturers in negotiations to join for the 2021 season, something that the coronavirus pandemic hindered.

“It’s a little bit disappointing, we actually had two manufacturers competing with each other for our team to become the new factory team for 2021,” said Walkinshaw.

“Sadly with the impact of COVID-19 both of this negotiations collapsed, which is really disappointing. One of them we were at contract stage.

“One had never raced in Australia before, one of which had. I was pretty excited about getting those guys back into Australian motorsport, but sadly it wasn’t to be.”

The team will run Holdens next year no matter the outcome of the current negotiations.

“The reason we’ll be running a Holden next year is because there’s not many options available,” said Walkinshaw told.

“Absolutely no disrespect to Ford because I’m actually a closet fan of a lot of Ford products and don’t buy into the aggressive Ford versus Holden rhetoric that a lot of other people do but I just think it would be detrimental to our fan base and to our race team for us to pivot across to a manufacturer that has had such a long history of competing with our team and our fans.

“So in respect of having only that option and Holden, we’re going to be continuing with the ZB Holden Commodore. However, we are anticipating that we will have a new manufacturer hopefully for 2022 or 2023.”