Supercars confident it can find engine parity

The series is set to abandon its current bespoke five-litre pushrod V8s for tuned crate motors from Ford and Chevrolet as part of its Gen3 rules.

The Ford Mustangs will be powered by a 5.4-litre version of the 5.2-litre Aluminator crate motor, while its expected, but not confirmed, that the Camaro will be powered by a 5.7-litre Chevrolet motor.

While reluctant to provide specifics on the motors currently being evaluated, Supercars' Head of Motorsport Adrian Burgess has confirmed that dyno work is well and truly underway.

He says Supercars is currently looking at how different aspects of the engines can be tuned to paritise performance between motors that are different sizes and layouts.

That work will ramp up once the Ford and GM homologation representatives have submitted their final designs, however he's already confident that parity is achievable.

"We're not going publish finite details because at the moment that's still in the realms of the two manufacturers that both submitted engines to us," Burgess said.

"We've ran both engines on the dynos and our job at the moment is to run through a variety of tools to use, like cam timing, injection timing, air restrictors, all these things.

"We're going through a lot of runs on the dyno, establishing how big an affect each of those areas has in changing either the peak power or the power curve.

"We're doing that on both engines at the moment and just basically assessing what tools we've got to paritise the engines.

"Once they've been given to us as a final presentation from each of the engine homologation teams, once they say this is our widget, then our job will be to get those engines as close as we can.

"You look at our engines now, we've got five different engines from five different engine builders, and we don't hear anyone complaining about engine parity. So we're confident we'll be able to paritise them with the tools that we think we'll have to use.

"But until they each give us a final specification, then nothing's really locked in."

The homologation engine builders are under understood to be Mostech (Ford) and KRE (GM).

There had been talk that the GM engine would be the 6.2-litre LS3, but according to Burgess that won't be the case. However he also stopped short of confirming that it will be a 5.7-litre version of the motor.

"We haven't received the final spec from both [Ford and GM]," he said. "The 5.4 will be [Ford's] spec but GM is still working through different configurations, different options. But it won't be a 6.2.

"We're working with them to understand what they want to be able to build and what they can build, but again, there's a lot of parties involved in this and there's a lot of commercial and marketing considerations to be taken into account."

As it stands engine supply is open in Supercars, with KRE supplying Triple Eight and its customer teams and Brad Jones Racing, Mostech supplying Dick Johnson Racing, Walkinshaw Andretti United building engines for itself and Erebus Motorsport, and Kelly Grove Racing and Tickford Racing running in-house engine programmes.

It's likely, but yet to be confirmed, that KRE and Mostech will be the sole engine suppliers under the Gen3 rules.