Jose Fernandez has revealed the plans for his 2011 entry to World Time Attack. Fernandez Motorsport is in the process of preparing a “super lightweight” FG Ford ute that will be powered by a more refined version of the XR6 Turbo engine that he ran last year in the ex-V8 Supercar.
“We came away last year with a lot more of an idea what needs to happen to make a competitive time attack car,” said Jose at his Sydney race shop.
“A V8 Supercar may be a great race car, but for this type of thing it is unlikely they would ever be competitive. To start with they are built to do 500 laps door handle to door handle and are built very strong, but they are also very heavy. With the ute we are starting with a clean slate and we will construct most of the body from carbon fibre and include a big aero package. Our aim is to have the whole thing race ready at around 1000kg.”
“We will be using many Supercar components such as up-rights, suspension parts and the Holinger sequential gearbox, but this will be a whole different deal to what we ran last year. We aim to be competitive with this one from the get go.”
Fernandez Motorsport will also be refining the engine to make the whole package a lot more tractable. This will include resizing the turbo and moving everything down to obtain a lower centre of gravity, with Alex and Oyay from Plazmaman once again being involved in the development.
“Basically anything that doesn’t need to be there will be going, and anything that does need to be there will be lightened as much as physically possible, and I have the best carbon fibre guy in the business, Ian Pollard, helping me. It is important to remember in this sport you only need to get one REALLY good lap in.” said Jose
When quizzed about why he chose a ute, we received a very quick response of “Why not? We are in Australia and Australians LOVE utes!”
The rendering shown is only the livery concept and the finished vehicle will have a lot more aero and will sit a lot lower, but we get the impression that the time attack bug has bitten pretty hard at Fernandez Motorsport and this team certainly has the resources to build something VERY special.
We will keep you up to date with this project as it gets closer but in the meantime check out www.fernandezmotorsport.com
