Building a better mousetrap

HRT has just slipped Garth Tander and Will Davison into two new VE Commodores that are the product of countless hours of discussion, design and development. V8X takes a closer look at just what it took to get them from ‘wish list’ to the track

It’s been two-and-a-half seasons since the Holden Racing Team rolled a brand-new V8 Supercar out of the transporter and into action.

As if recognising how long that timespan is in racing terms, the factory team has just debuted not one but two new VE Commodores at the Darwin championship round for Garth Tander and Will Davison. For Tander, still an outside shot at the championship, WR012 (or Walkinshaw Racing chassis number 12) represented the potential performance gain to get him consistently to the top of the rostrum and maybe the top of the points table.

For Davison, this was a new experience as he has never had a brand-new chassis...

Wingmen

The relationship between a racing driver and his engineer is perhaps the most important in the motor racing world. But, like most good pairings, you only get out what you put in. Join Andrew Clarke as he delves into the psychology of this unique and vital bond

Courting Success

Once destined for Formula 1, James Courtney’s career veered off course and took him into V8 Supercars earlier than expected. Here the Jim Beam Racing star tells V8X what turned him off F1 and why Ford dropping its JBR sponsorship was a positive, as well as hitting back at his critics...

If James Courtney’s life had panned out differently, chances are he would have followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the family’s carpet-laying company.

Instead, he put his heart and soul into working up to a Formula 1 career, but after that came crashing down he took a shortcut in his grand plan...

Raising the stakes

Often viewed as a dumping ground for old V8 Supercars, the Fujitsu Series is also the breeding ground for future V8 stars. But following the adoption of new endurance racing rules, experienced main-game drivers are starting to flood the development series. Should they be allowed to? V8X investigates...

When Cameron McConville retired from full-time racing at the end of last year, never in his wildest dreams would he have considered taking up a Fujitsu Series drive.

Yet no more than six months later, ‘McConkers’ found himself campaigning a Walkinshaw Racing cast-off Commodore at Winton. He has become part of a revolution which is changing the Fujitsu Series landscape at a fast pace...

Going Soft

Can ‘soft-tyre only’ races transform V8 Supercars as we know it? V8X attempts to sort the fact from the fiction...

Well, this is more like it.’ If that thought didn’t pass through your head at least once while watching the Willowbank and Winton V8 Supercars rounds then welcome to the championship, because you obviously haven’t been tuning in for very long...

No-man’s Land

No-man’s land is the zone between countries that share a border, a place technically without sovereignty. In V8 Supercars no-man’s land is when you pit without an early, mid or late-stopping strategy in mind. And in Winton’s Saturday race, that’s exactly the situation Mark Winterbottom found himself in...

We all know there are critical times in a motor race, and over the 1121 laps completed by the cars in the Saturday race at Winton, there were perhaps hundreds of them. That’s 13,440 corners and 3363km – and plenty of opportunity for a driver to get it wrong.

But even with all those options, the pitstop still remains the most critical part of a race...

Follow the leader

Social media has taken V8 Supercars by storm, giving fans the most direct access yet to the high-octane heroes they adore

Will Davison is playing golf with Lee Holdsworth, Mark Winterbottom is doing weights at the gym, Fabian Coulthard is at the vet with his dog Missy and Steven Richards is deciding between mayonnaise and mustard at an airport café.

It’s a Thursday before a non-racing weekend and V8 Supercar fans are still keeping track of what their driving heroes are up to thanks to the social networking phenomenon...