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LOW, WIDE AND FAST. SUPERCARS HAS ENTERED A NEW, BETTER, ERA WITH ITS GEN3 CARS. WE DIVE DEEP ON THE ENGINEERING THAT WILL BREATHE NEW LIFE INTO AUSTRALIA’S FAVOURITE MOTORSPORT

- CAMERON KIRBY

HE GOALS FOR the Gen3 Supercars you see before you are relatively straightforward, if difficult to achieve – look more like their roadgoing counterparts, reduce operating costs and improve on-track racing. Making those goals a reality is nonnegotiable. It’s no exaggeration to say that the new ruleset which will debut in 2023 is the most important of Supercars’ modern, post-Group A era. Get it wrong, and Gen3 could well become GenLast.

Holden is dead and gone, and in its place arrives Chevrolet Racing, fielding a Camaro ZL1 to take on Ford’s iconic Mustang. The biggest change for Gen3 is clearly the visuals, with the Mustang and Camaro both being realistic representations of the road cars they are based upon. This is thanks to a clean-sheet chassis design built from the ground up to accommodate a range of different body styles. While two-door muscle cars will exclusively take to the grid when Gen3 begins, the steel floorplan and tubular chassis has been engineered in a way to suit both smaller sports cars, and larger four-door sedans should new manufacturers be brave enough to enter the fray.

“We certainly wanted to make sure the cars looked the part as the manufacturers wanted to, so that other manufacturers that want to come in, they see that their cars aren’t massacred, aren’t destroyed,” Jeromy Moore, the technical director at Triple Eight Race Engineering, tells MOTOR. The Banyo-based squad took the initial lead on designing the control chassis, and is the homologation team for General Motors, having been the factory Holden squad from 2017 until the end of last year.