MOTORSPORT: Camaro for Bathurst!

The Chevrolet Camaro will be at the Bathurst 1000 this weekend.

But there’s no point rushing to the telly to watch Supercars star James Courtney and Scott Pye hurtling around Mount Panorama in a racing version of the iconic US pony car.

While the Camaro will be in Mobil 1 Boost Mobile warpaint normally seen on the Walkinshaw Andretti United Holden ZB Commodore Supercar, it will be a production vehicle freshly converted – sorry remanufactured – to right-hand drive by Holden Special Vehicles.

The Camaro ‘Supercar’ will take pride of place on the WAU merchandise stand. Primarily, the idea is to pull in punters to spend their money on racing paraphernalia and maybe snare potential buyers for the $85,990 V8 coupe.

But there is a further motivation; to stir up public discussion and interest in the Camaro Supercar program HSV and WAU have been quietly working on since early this year.

“The team livery is probably a little bit tantalising to see what might be,” HSV managing director Tim Jackson told motoring.com.au.

Jackson, who is also Ryan Walkinshaw’s chief lieutenant within the Walkinshaw Group – which co-owns WAU along with Andretti Autosport and United Autosports – has been central to the Camaro Supercars campaign from the beginning.

As we reported earlier this year, there are technical issues with the Supercars homologation process for Camaro.

HSV feared the standard Supercars Gen2 rollcage was too high at the rear to allow the Camaro’s roofline and rear screen retain the integrity of its road-car shape.

Having had the tuning company’s engineers conduct computer aided design (CAD) testing, Jackson says there is now absolutely no doubt the rollcage will have to be modified for the Camaro’s body to fit over it.

“In order to make it fit the rollcage it looks more like an Aussie Racing Car,” Jackson said. “I am certainly not interested in it if it looks like that.

“It’s skinny and tall … it would look a bit weird.

“It’s going to require a rule change. In order to be comfortable to put it together in a way that reflects what Camaro is about we would need a rule change to address the rollcage.”

The problem is that gaining the rule change requires the backing of Supercars team owners – some of whom such as Brad Jones and Todd Kelly sit on the all-important Supercars commission.

The challenging task of winning them over would have to be achieved quite quickly if the Camaro is to race in 2020, a year after the Ford Mustang makes its Supercars debut in 2019.

Jackson says no formal request has been made as yet for a rule change to be considered.

While rival team owners may prove hard for WAU and HSV to get onside, Supercars itself is said to have been more positive in its attitude toward the Camaro plan, although it has not been enlisted to help to bring it to fruition. That seems likely to change.

“At some point, we will probably ask the question of Supercars how interested they are in having a Camaro in the Supercars field,” said Jackson.

One thing is for sure, HSV and WAU are uninterested in continuing with the program – even with technical approval for a rule change – without the full backing of Holden and parent General Motors.

Holden already supports the ZB Commodore in the championship, while along with GM it OKs HSV’s access to Camaro and the Chevrolet Silverado pick-up for local sale.

“If I am in GM’s shoes and if I am racing Camaro then I will want to be successful, so we need a really strong plan behind all this,” said Jackson.

“We can talk about rules and regulations and wanting to race, but there needs to be an extraordinarily strong plan behind all that, because I am sure GM wouldn’t be happy if we go racing and spend our time coming second, third, fourth or fifth or something worse.”