Holdens new VE Commodore Racer

With the 2007 season almost upon us, the big news in the Holden camp is the launching of the all new VE Commodore.

Late last year, Holden released what is arguably its most important vehicle, the VE Commodore to the public for sale. The trickle on effect for the V8 series is that it allows the Holden teams to introduce the new body shell for the 2007 season.

The new body shell will bring with it both new technical challenges and hopefully some improvements over the 2006 championship winning VZ body.

Unfortunately for the Holden team, this year sees the traditional V8 SuperCar ‘warm-up’ at the Melbourne F1 GP, not being run this year. This has to do with a new TV broadcaster for the series. The new TV broadcaster does not televise the F1, so no race (although AVESCO, the governing body for V8 SuperCars denies this and say it was scheduling issues)

The F1 round, gives all teams an opportunity to have a ‘live’ test for the cars. It allows the teams to get a real idea of how their cars are performing, especially against others in a true race format. Testing just cannot give you a true indication.

This may give the Ford camp a slight advantage for the first few races of the series. It will surely take the Holden teams a few races to shake out the cobwebs and get ideal race set ups. In saying this however, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Holden Racing Team is quick straight out of the box.

As for Ford, with Falcon now in its third update (now the BF Falcon) with no significant changes other than minor aerodynamic improvements have been made.

With the series based on a ‘parity’ structure the AVESCO ensures that all are on a level playing field so we can only hope they have got it right. In fairness they have been testing the parity for a long time.

Cheers

 Dave