Racer - 2014 Chevrolet Special

AustrAliAN v8 supercArs

a win straight out of the box at the opening race in Adelaide, yet team owner Roland Dane believes that his squad was operating well short of the level he’d have liked at the start of the 2013 season.

“The beginning of the season in
particular was tough,” he says. “Some of
the results we had, like winning that first
race at Adelaide, were really in spite of
everything that was going on; just
because maybe we didn’t do a very good
job, but nobody else did, either.”
Mid-season changes helped the team to
turn things around. Firstly, Dane reclaimed
the team principal role in August and then,
based on his insistence that Triple Eight
take stock of what it was doing, the team
refocused, regrouped and returned to how
it raced in the past: keep it simple, play to
your strengths, stick to the gameplan and
don’t be forced off of it by minor
distractions. Route one racing.

Ater a mid-season slump in which the team failed to win in five races (a lifetime by Triple Eight’s standards), the return to form coincided with the high point-paying endurance races at Sandown and Bathurst.

“From September onward, which is really the make-or-break part of the year, that’s really where we broke the back of the opposition, I suppose,” Dane says. “But I didn’t feel that we were really on top of it the way we were in 2011 and ’ 12, when we went to every race track with a car that was pretty much there all the time. Last year was much harder than that.

“How did we turn it around? Self-
examination. We had to go back and look
at where we’d done a good job, where we
hadn’t, and why we hadn’t. Once we
refocused our energy and did what we’ve
done in the past, we started to narrow
down where our weak points were – in
terms of setup, in terms of our approach
to the weekend – and then we rolled out at
Sandown and, frankly, we were there or
thereabouts the rest of the year.”
No team in the field could
underestimate the scale of the challenge
in adapting to the new-spec car. Some
refinements, such as the arrival of
independent rear suspension, might seem
no-brainers when measured against the
relatively archaic configuration that they
replaced, but Dane says that this was
actually one of the biggest hurdles.

“You’d think an independent rear end is always going to be better, but the live axles were incredibly well-developed,” he says.

“We’d spent the best part of 10 years developing our own to a very high level and then, suddenly, it was all change. We also had an 18in. tire, and while the compounds were similar to those we’d used before, the construction was completely different from the [previous] 17in.

“The weight distribution of the cars changed, too,” he adds, “with the relocation of the fuel tank and the transaxle, meaning the balance of the cars effectively doesn’t change as much as it used to during a