Expert Preview: The 60% stat backing Kiwis, and why stakes have increased

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.

The engineering challenges of a new track, why Taupō's set-up sheet might hold the key to Ruapuna, and the Kiwi win stat that makes this weekend's prediction easy.

New track engineering apprehension

New circuits are a rare occurrence in Supercars. Heading into the unknown may be appetising for fans and drivers, but it creates apprehension from an engineer's perspective. Unknowns are an engineer's least favourite ingredient, so reducing them in the lead up to the event is priority number one.

The starting point

The most important part of a Race Engineer's job is specifying the car set-up for an event. The 'set-up sheet' is what the engineer deems to be the best settings to allow the car and driver combination to get around the track as fast as possible. These settings are a result of a lot of data analysis, discussions with the driver and experience of what's worked and hasn't worked in the past.

The initial car set-up has a huge impact on how your weekend goes. Get it wrong and you often don't have time or bandwidth to correct it amidst the pace of a race weekend.

At new tracks, there's no data to analyse from past events, meaning you need to draw on similarities to other circuits to create your starting point. In Ruapuna's case, the layout and the YouTube vision available make it appear similar to Taupō, convenient since that's fresh in everyone's mind.

Circuit characteristics

It's likely most cars will start the weekend very close to how they would've started Sunday at Taupō had we raced. The major difference between Ruapuna and Taupō appears to be that the corners are shorter, or tighter, meaning less time spent turning.

This puts a premium on 'point', which is the abbreviated way of describing how sharp the front of the car turns into the corner. If you're spending less time turning, it means you're spending more time in a straight line, which means you need to get through the corner as quickly as possible.

That's of course true for all tracks, but shorter corners put a bigger premium on straight-line performance. So, if we assume everyone's braking performance is the same (which it's not), at Ruapuna, you're going to want a car that is sharp on turn-in, hits the apex already well rotated, and is as straight as possible on the exit so you can get to full throttle as early as possible.

This is where the lap time comes from — getting to full throttle quicker than everyone else, which is only achieved if the car is straighter than everyone else on corner exit, which is only achieved if your car has rotated well in the corner… which all comes back to great 'point'.

The stakes have increased

The rescheduling of the cancelled Taupō race to Friday means nailing the car set-up from the outset will be extra important. There'll be no chance to analyse the practice data overnight, meaning your Friday performance will be largely tied to your initial car set-up.

It will be interesting to see whether there are car set-ups being changed on Thursday afternoon after the driver and engineer have completed the official track walk. On that, there's no better way to infuriate the mechanics than asking them to change the set-up of the car before you've even been on track.

Whenever I did this, I'd assure the mechanics it was the difference between winning silverware or not. That was rarely true, so it would usually cost me a round of drinks on Sunday night instead.

New track form guide

In preparation for this article, I crunched the numbers looking for any evidence of drivers who perform exceptionally well at new tracks. The result was underwhelming, with nothing worthy of publishing that suggests a particular driver will excel this weekend based purely on it being a new track.

What we do know is that New Zealand drivers go well in New Zealand races. In the last 20 races held there (since 2016), Kiwi drivers have won 60% of them, despite making up just 17% of the field. They're winning at 3.5 times the rate you'd expect based on their representation in the field.

So if we piece everything together, we're going to a track that's similar to Taupō, where performance could well reflect what we saw in Taupō. Plus, there's a 60% chance a Kiwi will win. Therefore it has to be Ryan Wood or Matt Payne winning the Jason Richards Trophy, unless Brodie Kostecki has some Kiwi heritage we don't know about…

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.