The president of Ford Australia said the car maker is open to working with its newly signed V8 Supercars partner Triple Eight on other projects including road cars – and the Bathurst-winning team is keen.
Ford Australia is “open” to working with V8 Supercars Championship outfit Triple Eight Race Engineering on projects beyond its Ford Mustang race car – including road car collaborations.
This could include special editions of its best-selling Ford Ranger and its Everest SUV spin-off as well as the iconic V8-powered Ford Mustang sports car.
The two could also collaborate on performance parts and upgrades offered through Ford dealers across Australia and New Zealand.
“The Ranger is the most loved car in the country at the moment, so we'd love to be able to [work with Ford Australia],” Triple Eight Race Engineering team principal, stakeholder and race driver Jamie Whincup told Drive.
“The people that buy Rangers, they're looking to expand on the standard road car, advance them even further,” Whincup added.
“We couldn't be any more aligned with where we want to go in that space … we've done our motorsport deal with Ford Performance in the US, but we want to closely align with Ford Australia and their road car division through [president and CEO] Andrew Birkic.”
The deal also saw Triple Eight move from being the Chevrolet homologation team to replace Dick Johnson Racing (DJR) as responsible for homologating the Ford in V8 Supercars from 2026.
Speaking to Speedcafe, Ford’s president and CEO Andrew Birkic said: “They are first and foremost an engineering company that is a very good race team, so there’s no reason why not.”
“What that looks like we don’t know, but certainly we have an open mind.”
It’s a change of tune for the car maker, who appeared – publicly at least – not as keen to work with Walkinshaw Andretti United (WAU) when it signed the former Holden team to race Ford Mustangs from 2023.
Ford did tap WAU sister company Walkinshaw Performance to prepare a Ford Ranger Raptor which won a pair of Finke Desert Races – while fending off a local GMSV Chevrolet entry driven by V8 Supercars star Craig Lowndes – and a class win at the famous Baja off-road race in Mexico.
Yet the partnership did not spill over into road cars despite Walkinshaw’s extensive and proven record in the industry – having started as Holden Special Vehicles (HSV) in 1987– Walkinshaw releasing its own special edition off-road Ford Ranger in 2024.
Ironically, WAU and Walkinshaw Performance’s parent company Walkinshaw Group – which now employs more people than Ford Australia – converts the Ram 1500/2500, Chevrolet Silverado and Toyota Tundra full-size pick-ups to right-hand drive for their respective local brands.
WAU announced in 2024 it would be moving manufacturers yet again – this time becoming the homologation team for Toyota – meaning it is the lead team in developing the Gen 3 Toyota Supra to the V8 Supercars grid in 2026.
“We’ve done Finke and WAU has helped us in certain areas,” said Birkic. “Obviously, they’re moving onto another camp, so we do see opportunities for Triple Eight.”
Those opportunities are yet to be clearly identified, but when pressed by Speedcafe the Ford boss said preliminary discussions have already taken place.
“Just in terms of at a higher level, what have they got, what are we looking for? We’ll see how that pans out,” he said.
Triple Eight Race Engineering was responsible for the development of the ‘Gen 3’ chassis introduced to V8 Supercars in 2023 – and used across all brands in the category, including the upcoming Toyota Supra.
“That’s a space where we're heavily, heavily investing in at the moment, and our Ford partnership will start in 2026 and we would absolutely love to start some road car performance parts at the same time,” Whincup told Drive.
“We've got 20 years of development, and we're used to making two cars and a wildcard [part-time third entry] go around the track as fast as they possibly can, and we've also done a lot of GT work.
"All this development, well, it's been fantastic that we've used that to our advantage in motorsport [but] part of me feels like it's wasted a little bit, with all that resource, all that development having just gone into two-and-a-half cars doing it.
“We'd absolutely love the opportunity to be able to have everyone be able to experience that development that we've generated over 20 years in their everyday driving, everyday road driving.”
Ford’s last road-car tie-up of sorts with V8 Supercars was back in 2007 with its XR6, XR6 Turbo and XR8 “by Craig Lowndes” Falcon utes, the seven-time Bathurst winner racing a Triple Eight Falcon at the time.
Ford Performance tapped Herrod Performance to develop the 5.4-litre V8 Coyote engine currently under the bonnet of every Mustang V8 Supercar on the grid since 2023.
