Expert Preview: Triple Eight's tricky tuning challenge

This is an exclusive pre-event Supercars.com column by championship-winning Race Engineer Scott Sinclair. Sinclair will preview and debrief each round of the 2026 Repco Supercars Championship from his own perspective.

There's been seven different race winners from the last seven races, something we haven't seen in nearly 30 years.

It's made for an unpredictable run into Townsville, where three questions stand out.

Can Penrite Racing strengthen their hold on the #1 team mantle? Will the Walkinshaw Toyotas be back at the front? And the biggest of the lot: can Triple Eight return to the podium?

Penrite in prime position

For the first time in their history, Penrite Racing occupies the prime position in pit lane, the reward for leading the teams' championship.

There are plenty of facets to their rise, but the standout has been their race pace this year. Matt Payne is ranked #1 and Kai Allen #3. A team having both cars ranked in the top three for pace is a rarity which, not surprisingly, only Triple Eight has achieved in the recent past.

But you can't just switch on car speed like that. It's the product of a long, boring path: a methodical and systematic build of the organisation from the ground up, never losing sight of what matters most. The results are now on display for everyone to see; the day-to-day grind of the last five years wasn't.

As Lionel Messi put it: it took me 17 years and 114 days to become an overnight sensation.

Triple Eight's chassis tuning challenge

Triple Eight's Red Bull Ampol Mustangs are the intriguing watch this weekend. The team haven't publicly spelled out the exact cause of their struggles, but the sensitivity of the Mustang compared to last year's Camaro appears to be a contributor.

It aligns with what the Camaro teams found earlier in the year after the off-season wind tunnel testing pushed their aero balance closer to the Mustang's. Reversing this change was the basis of the parity tweaks the Camaro teams pursued and had implemented for Tasmania. That's not an option for Red Bull Ampol, however.

If sensitivity is the issue, it's little wonder it's taking longer than we'd expect a Triple Eight team to solve. A sensitive car is hard enough to tune before you add the variables you can't control: weather, track conditions, even the tyre the support category ran before you.

The data also supports what we're seeing on track. Both drivers' Tyre Degradation rankings have dropped considerably compared to last year. Feeney's also dropped from #1 to #5 for how consistent his lap times are during a race. Both measures point to a car that isn't easy to drive.

Townsville offers no respite from the tuning challenge. It's a circuit that requires brake stability as well as high and low speed change of direction. It also punishes a car with poor loaded drive, which leads to high tyre degradation. Hence the intrigue around Triple Eight's performance.

Townsville's strategy rewards

Townsville's harshness on tyres makes it an outlier among the street circuits we visit. It's the third hardest of the year, in fact, caused by the long loaded corner exits through the final part of the lap.

Tyre degradation opens up strategy options, which flow into more overtaking, one reason Townsville is among the highest-overtaking tracks on the calendar.

A fresh tyre set is worth a little over a second a lap, so the potential gains you can make via race strategy are huge. On top of that, each car has an extra set of tyres compared to last year, meaning an alternate strategy could swing the result if a safety car falls the right way.

Walkinshaw's up and down season

Across every consistency metric I track, both in racing and qualifying, Chaz Mostert and Ryan Wood sit close to the bottom. While there's been wins and poles, we've also seen just about everything that can go wrong going wrong.

So is it time to panic about either driver missing the Finals? Not yet, for three reasons. First, they have the raw speed to bank big points on their day, which keeps you in touch.

Second, engine reliability, the source of their biggest points losses, has a targeted fix due before the Enduro events.

And third, no one outside the top 10 has so far shown themselves good enough to displace Wood or Mostert, troubles and all.

Since his engine let go at Ruapuna seven races ago, Wood hasn't finished better than seventh. A stretch this long without a top five finish is a rarity for him. Mostert's been in a dip of his own since winning in Tasmania. If history counts for anything though, both are due a big weekend in Townsville.

10 from 10?

I'm a numbers guy, so forgive me for wanting three different winners this weekend. That would make it ten different winners from the last ten races, something that hasn't happened in at least 25 years. Brodie Kostecki, Ryan Wood and Will Brown are all more than capable of getting it done. Here's hoping they do!

Scott Sinclair is one of the most respected voices in pit lane, famously engineering James Courtney to the 2010 championship with Dick Johnson Racing. Sinclair also spent stints at the Holden Racing Team and Kelly Racing, spent time on the Supercars Commission, and recently joined Supercars as a data analyst.

The views in this article do not necessarily express the opinions of Supercars, teams or drivers.