It's been a long time since I last wrote on this blog, but I've now found a reason to come back to it. I want to publish my data on Ford's 2023 Supercars season. I keep thinking that it's not that bad, and that Ford are overreacting. Then I looked at how many top tens they scored, how many cars Ford have versus Chevrolet, which drivers scored the top tens, and then percentages to show how bad it really looks.
First of all, I agree with the idea that Supercars should be a technical parity sport rather than outcome parity. It is possible that most of the Ford drivers aren't good enough and neither are their teams, but that may not be the case.
The first thing to surprise me was that Newcastle really wasn't that competitive for Ford. Only 4 drivers scored a third of the top tens. All 4 were in the ten on Saturday, but Courtney crashed in the shootout on Sunday and Waters crashed during the race that day. This is also remembering that Reynolds was on pole on Sunday too.
The next thing is that Sydney Motorsport Park was a shocking round for Ford. A score of 25% of possible top tens for half of the field is pretty poor. Then you see that only 3 drivers scored those top tens. So everybody else was struggling all weekend. Mostert and De Pasquale scored podiums, so it looked good in terms of trophy return, but Mostert didn't seem happy about the overall performance and Waters was pretty fired up on the radio too.
Perth wasn't a surprising result to me. I call it a point and shoot track, where almost every corner is slow and there are 3 straights to go full beans on. So Reynolds and Courtney walked away with some trophies, WAU were typically crap at Perth so got a few top tens, and surprisingly Blanchard Racing Team with Hazelwood were strong but got worse over the course of the weekend.
The one that is interesting is the strongest weekend. The Bend is usually a strong track for Fords, but it's hard to say why now that the cars are supposed to be the same. Last generation you could have said that the Fords were good in a straight line, but much of The Bend is long winding turns like a sideways rollercoaster. There were also some rapidly-made aerodynamic changes on the cars in between Darwin and Townsville because Darwin was the most miserable result of the year for Ford. Townsville was okay, De Pasquale was the first driver to legitimately win in a Ford (Waters' Newcastle result counts as a win, but only because Triple Eight was disqualified), and Mostert got a podium that weekend too. Maybe the Bend went well for Ford because the long winding turns wear the tyres out badly on every car like how Perth is in constant need of resurfacing. Then the massive drop in downforce across the field for the new gen cars mean that they slide around a lot more. That would explain why Albert Park was such a mixed bag.
The next round is the Sandown 500, and then the Bathurst 1000. For the sake of the series, I hope that we see a Ford on the podium and a reasonable handful in the top ten.
Also because I did a Chevy version of all of this, the two most disappointing teams of 2023 are Blanchard Racing Team and PremiAir Racing (Chevy). No idea what went wrong for those guys, but damn.
Cheers!
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