The end of the road has come for the Supercars in their current configuration. With no replacement of any kind from General Motors and presumably none from Ford, that effectively leaves the entire series orphaned as legacy vehicles. The ZB Commodore can continue into 2021 but with no underlying company or brand behind it and the S550 Mustang is virtually a bespoke piece of kit.
Actually, all of the cars have been bespoke to a very large degree since about 1999 when Ford ceased to produce their 302 Windsor V8 for the road and Holden stopped producing their own V8, with the racing engines being crate motors from GM's competition division.
I think that everyone can concede that the days of privateers building race cars out of stuff that they found out in the showroom probably ended by about 1990.
So where does that leave us? It either means that the top category of motor racing in Australia simply adopts GT3, or perhaps TransAm2, or TCR, or the rules from GT300 or GT500 from Super GT.
There is however another option.
Dallara is currently developing the standard chassis for NASCAR's Gen-7 iteration. NASCAR faced the problem of having no cars out on the showroom to develop into racecars in the late 1980's when none of the proposed cars on the road had a wheelbase of 110" nor did they carry V8 engines. Supercars could in theory simply adopt NASCAR's Gen-7 regulations virtually wholesale, but with the existing front and rear aero kits from the existing cars.
The other option which I see is just to abandon the premise that Supercars are based on road machinery and adopt the Mustang and its bespoke rollcage, undertray, gearbox, differential and drivetrain, wiring looms and ECUs etc, as the new standard.
The truth is that the Mustang Supercars don't really look like the road going versions at all. I do not know what kind of cars that they are supposed to be but I do know that provided you can change the front and rear light clusters and the grill up front, then you can make a standard race car adopt whatever identity you like.
Since the entire of the shell save for the dressing on the front and rear would be identical, then you could have a Mazda, a Volvo, a Skoda, a Great Wall, or any label that you like on the ends of the car. You could even have fictional motor companies like Mifune Motors from Speed Racer, Valiante from Michel Valiant, or even bring back Holden to the racetrack if you wanted.
If that sound like a daft proposal, just remember that Super GT with its GT300 provided a so called 'Mother Chassis' upon which a standard engine and drivetrain could be applied and that gave us the Mooncraft MC/RT-16 Shiden.
Super GT when faced with the prospect of having no native GT3 cars, simply opened up the rules to produce a GT3 equivalent and let everyone have a fairly open field; which was then tempered by Balance of Performance regulation. That is how we currently have a Toyota 86 with a Nissan VK45 engine, another with a Celica GT4 engine, another running the mother chassis and the standard engine, and a Subaru BRZ with the WRC engine.
The Mooncraft MC/RT-16 Shiden car ran for a few seasons and to be fair, the idea of a completely bespoke car is actually kind of cool.
Of course Formula One has always been running bespoke chassis since the late 1970s, with every team building their own kit; usually that only means a short run of about 5 cars per year. If Supercars adopted a common car and swapped out the light clusters and engines depending on what kind of brand that they were running, then there only needs to be a run of about 40 chassis per year which need to be centrally fabricated. For the initial season of the new chassis, all of the work could be done in time for February 2022.
The fundamental DNA of the sport with its loud engines and all of the current aspects of why the sport need not change; not even the existing Mustangs would need to be retired.
Also, the idea of having continual arguments about parity, which to be honest have been going on since before I was born, would simply cease. Apart from small differences in engine power which could either be solved with fuel restrictors like they do in GT3 or success ballast like they run in the BTCC.
Implementing any change will be difficult but it need not be. The solution to the problem could already be sitting out on the track.
Per ad Ardua Astra,
Rollo.
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