SUPERCARS is looking into the spate of cool suit issues that occurred in the Sunday race at Sydney Motorsport Park.
Broc Feeney, Will Brown and David Reynolds were all left worse for wear after one way or another their cooling systems failed them in sweltering conditions.
Brown reported thinking “I was going to die in the car” while Reynolds declared “you couldn’t pay me $100 million to feel like that again”.
All three are among the select few drivers in the field who use an off-the-shelf electric cool suit system (i.e. each of the cars from Triple Eight, Team 18, Grove Racing and PremiAir Racing).
The remainder use customised dry ice-based systems.
Pic: Will Brown Instagram
“Driver health and wellbeing is very important to us,” Supercars chief motorsport officer Tim Edwards told V8 Sleuth.
“We have been working with the two teams (Triple Eight and Team 18) trying to understand what went wrong and what can be done to prevent that.
“That is one thing that is not controlled by the category, it’s open to the teams.”
The cool suit dramas prompted some to question why air-conditioning isn’t a feature of Gen3 Supercars like it is in GT3 machines – so, V8 Sleuth put it to Edwards.
“It was investigated with these cars but the cabin temperature and insulation, effectively you would have to make such a wholesale change to the car because it’s a pretty hostile environment,” he explained.
“Imagine, you take the carpet out of your (road) car and you’ll find there is deep insulation on all of the surfaces to insulate the cabin; the roof, the door, everything is insulated to allow the air-conditioning to work.
“Your air-conditioning at home doesn’t work real well if you leave the doors and windows open, and obviously we have a lot of air passing in and out. Some of the holes in our windows are regulatory, they need to be there for marshals to remove the windows.
“So the way our cabins are designed doesn’t lend itself very easily to having air-conditioning.”
In any case, cool suits are not expected to be a topic for the next several rounds, until the next warm-weather event at Darwin’s Hidden Valley Raceway in June.