COMPARING ‘LIKE WITH LIKE’ WILL BE THE ORDER FOR FUTURE SEASONS
A raft of new technical changes for the BNT NZ Touring Car Championship has been revealed, with the aim of creating a more equal playing field for the hotly contested Class One championship.
The Class One segment of the series comprises a mixture of former NZ SuperTourer chassis and NZV8 TLX chassis, with both variants housing a number of technical differences. These include different aero packages and engine packages.
For the upcoming 2016-17 season, however, more of these parts will become interchangeable on the two platforms. Confirmed in the category’s latest release, brake packages, front splitters, and rear wings can now swap, whereas in the past they have been distinct.
The alternate engines between the two types of car have long been a central talking point, and for the forthcoming season they, too, will see change. Having admitted a “small variance in power” between the SuperTourer Chevrolet LS7 unit and the different engines used by the TLX competitors, the series has elected to map each engine to an equal level via dyno testing.
Electronic throttle bodies will also become standard, whereas in the past several cars among the SuperTourer fleet used cable throttle. This will allow the series to achieve parity tunes. A new camshaft for entries using the LS7 engine to lower the level of power and torque to a more equal level is also on the cards for the future.
“The integration of NZST and TLX cars into a single Class One grid has worked. No one said it was going to be easy and to be fair it is still a work in progress with some positive results showing that the two different chassis types can compete together in one class,” said category manager Gary Lathrope.
The first round of the series will take place on November 4-6 at Pukekohe Park Raceway, as the series leads the support card for the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship ITM Auckland SuperSprint.