Commodore To Camaro

Will we see the Camaro take on the Mustang in Supercars? Bruce Newton examines the possibility with Walkinshaw Andretti United.

- Bruce Newton

If you’ve got your heart set on seeing in a new decade of Supercars racing in 2020 with the Chevrolet Camaro part of the action, be prepared to be disappointed. For all the positive talk, the Bathurst promotion and the obvious support of racing fans on social media, there are a series of significant hurdles to be overcome before serious work on a Supercars Camaro gets underway, let alone an actual racer fires up in anger.

Those hurdles stretch from the technical and the political to the financial and even, perhaps, the malicious. And they are substantial.

WHY CAMARO?

So why are we even talking about Camaro in the first place? You can trace that back to Holden’s decision to end local manufacturing and kill off the locally built Holden Commodore V8 that formed the basis of its touring-car attack for nearly 40 years.

Subsequently, but intrinsically related, was Holden’s decision to remove factory Holden Racing Team status from Walkinshaw Racing and hand it over to Triple Eight Race Engineering in 2017.

Along with that gig, Triple Eight was handed the sole right to develop the new-generation imported Commodore ZB (nee Opel Insignia) for Supercars racing. It also controls the sale of replacement body parts for the new car.

What that means is Walkinshaw Racing – in 2017 transformed into Walkinshaw Andretti United (WAU) with the buy-in from Michael Andretti and Zak Brown – has gone from a factory outfit to just another customer, paying to race a car over which it has had no fundamental development control.

And just as bad if not worse, WAU is no longer directly promoting cars being modified by Holden Special Vehicles (HSV), the Holden-sanctioned company started by the late Tom Walkinshaw that has prospered for 30 years on the back of the locally built Commodore V8.