The hidden benefit to Supercars Gen3 test delay

It was announced on Tuesday that long-held plans for teams to begin testing their new Gen3 cars next month have been shelved.

Instead the off-season programme has been re-organised, the build phase extended well into January before testing kicks off.

That will leave teams around six weeks from the shakedown of their new cars to the opening round of the season in Newcastle.

In between the shakedown and the season opener there will be just two dedicated test days for each team – one at either Winton (Victorian teams) or Queensland Raceway (Queensland teams) and an all-in test at Sydney Motorsport Park.

Given the development work with the prototypes has been focused on durability rather than set-up work, the compact test programme means teams will head to Newcastle with limited knowledge on how to extract speed from a Gen3 car.

While that might be a source of frustration for teams and drivers, Edwards says fans could be the big winners thanks to what will be highly unpredictable form for the first few rounds.

Should that happen it would be reminiscent of the 2013 season, the first for the Car of the Future platform, which saw a host of different winners.

"The reality is that it will throw the balls in the air for the first round, because we're all going to be scrambling to learn about these cars as quickly as we can," Edwards told Autosport.

"Nobody has done a toe sweep, nobody has done a camber sweep, nobody has done a ride height sweep. Nobody has done anything. Including the cars that have been run.

Tim Edwards, Tickford Racing Ford

Photo by: Dirk Klynsmith / Motorsport Images

"It's going to be like darts at a dartboard for the first few rounds.

"Roll the clock back to 2013; in 2012, Triple Eight and ourselves won every single race for the season, and in 2013, there was six different winners from the first nine races.

"We could end up with that this season. For the people sitting at home, the fact that we're not running these cars until January means we're going to be even deeper in the dark when we get on track, and it will result in quite a jumbled up grid while we're all trying to find our feet.

"That bodes well as a spectacle."

While the six-week turnaround is a stark contrast to the last technical overhaul, which saw teams testing COTF hardware as much as five months out from the first round, there appears to be a sense of satisfaction from teams that this delay is the right call.

According to Edwards the difference is the sheer amount of control parts which, at team level, shouldn't require durability testing.

"[The delay is] the right call, definitely," he said.

"We were borderline saying, 'Yeah, we can probably push for December'. But the reality is there are a few bits that are running late, and what you don't want to do is work right up to it, and then pull the pin on it.

"So we all agreed that it would be more comfortable for everybody.

James Courtney, Tickford Racing Ford

Photo by: Edge Photographics

"I don't think anybody is nervous about reliability and stuff like that. Yeah, there will be a few teething issues. But this is a different race car to what we've all built before.

"So much of it is, there's the design, it's been run. We're talking about things like uprights.

"If my engineers designed a new upright today, and we thought it was going to make our car go faster, we'd have a crack at machining it and running it on the car in Adelaide. That's what we do.

"We've done that in the past. I remember one time we came back from Darwin and we'd had a shit run.

"We said, 'stuff it, we're designing a new front end'. We designed and manufactured a completely new front end, new upright, new suspension arms, everything, and ran it successfully at Townsville.

"Yes there is risk in doing that, but that's the business we're in. So I don't think anybody is nervous about that."