TRIPLE Eight Race Engineering says a process shortcoming on its part was behind its latest cool suit dramas.
Both Will Brown and Broc Feeney suffered extreme overheating in the Sunday race at Sydney Motorsport Park.
That caught Triple Eight on the hop, having previously found the Chillout Motorsports electric systems to be near-on bulletproof.
“The old dry ice box, that was hit and miss. Every eight or nine runs you’d have an issue with it, where this has been absolutely faultless for us for three years straight, a fantastic system,” team principal Jamie Whincup told V8 Sleuth.
“We just had two internal failures on the one day, it was so strange.
“It was almost a race-stopper. Any hotter a day, or any longer a race, I think both cars would have had to come into the lane to either get the windows ripped out or a DNF.”
Triple Eight responded by outlaying a total of $24,000 for two new units… so when cool suit issues reared their head again in the longer Taupō race (to the point where Brown again ended up in the medical centre post-race), alarm bells were sounding.
But somewhat to the team’s relief, the cause this time around was far more preventable for the future.
“The SMP ones were clear failures in the units,” team manager Mark Dutton told V8 Sleuth.
“In the second race in Taupō, the boys had different cool suit vests on… usually what we’d do is pre-bleed the vests but with the quick turnaround we didn’t pre-bleed them.
“So it actually drained the fluid in the reservoirs in the cool suit units, which they have got an in-built safety mechanism that if the fluid level is too low, they’ll cut in and out.
“That’s why Will’s was cutting in and out a lot, Broc’s was cutting in and out a little bit.
“There was no failure; it was a failure of process on our side. Just unfortunately with the compressed schedule, it caught us out.”
Triple Eight uses cool suits in all races, and their functionality will become especially important at the hotter/longer events later in the season.