{"id":500376,"date":"2026-02-24T06:11:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T06:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/500376\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T06:11:20","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T06:11:20","slug":"ryan-walkinshaw-talks-toyota-v8-supercar-engine-after-sydney-500","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/500376\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Walkinshaw talks Toyota V8 Supercar engine after Sydney 500"},"content":{"rendered":"

WALKINSHAW TWG Racing has little more than a week to regroup after a mixed start for its Supra Supercar in Sydney that included the need for two engine changes.<\/p>\n

Toyota\u2019s Gen3 debut ended on a high with all five cars finishing top 10 in the Sunday afternoon race \u2013 an especially remarkable effort given the quintet had all qualified in the bottom nine.<\/p>\n

But while performance was promising enough, reliability has emerged as a question mark.<\/p>\n

The 2UR-GSE V8 in Andr\u00e9 Heimgartner<\/a>\u2019s Supra expired early in Race 2 of the season, prompting a late-night engine change that his Brad Jones Racing crew completed about 3am Sunday.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to do forensic analysis,\u201d Ryan Walkinshaw told V8 Sleuth.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have got some ideas on what it could be.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Ryan Walkinshaw (middle). Pic: Walkinshaw TWG Racing<\/p>\n

Walkinshaw TWG also executed a Saturday night engine change for Ryan Wood<\/a> on what it called precautionary grounds \u2013 although pitlane speculation hinted it was more due to the #2\u2019s motor being riddled with metal filings.<\/p>\n

Either way, both Toyota teams skipped yesterday\u2019s corporate ride day at Sydney Motorsport Park, with focus turning to the Melbourne SuperSprint at Albert Park which starts on Thursday week.<\/p>\n

Walkinshaw has been keen to temper expectations given the unexpected complexity associated with the Toyota engine and the fact that Ford and Chevrolet have a three-year headstart.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhenever you\u2019re doing that level of complexity in an engine, you need to do a lot of work, a lot of testing, and you will naturally have failures,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s just the reality of the beast that you\u2019re dealing with.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe were always going to wish we had more time to do more of that testing before the season started. You have got to look back at the start of Gen3, there was over a year of testing for the Ford motor and the KRE GM motor and they still had problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, how many Fords caught fire in the first few rounds? How many crankshafts failed? How many test sessions did we end up having to park all the Fords because everyone was terrified that we were going to blow a bunch of engines?<\/p>\n

\u201cEven last year, after four years essentially of development and running those engines in the category, we were still seeing engines fail.<\/p>\n

\u201cBroc lost the championship because his GM engine failed. We lost Bathurst because we actually ended up having three engine failures over two cars over the course of Bathurst. That\u2019s an engine that is tried, tested and proven in other categories; all those parts have been tested to the absolute nth degree and they still have issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo expecting us to be able to go out there with a brand-new engine and not have some challenges, that\u2019s just unrealistic.<\/p>\n

\"\"Pic: Mark Walker<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the important part is we have got the best guys in the business going through it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a minor miracle that we managed to get everything done to get all the cars with engines, with a spare engine for each car, for this round.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe obviously had an issue with Heimgartner\u2019s engine. We\u2019ll go through that thoroughly when we go back to the workshop and understand exactly what that problem is and come up with a fix for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the nature with anything that\u2019s in development, you will likely see us taking a very precautionary approach going forward and that involves if there\u2019s even the slightest sniff of something we see in the data or from the driver in the coming rounds, we\u2019re going to remove the engine, replace it with another one and just make sure that there\u2019s nothing untoward going on \u2013 as we did on Ryan\u2019s car.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked how they are now placed for spare engines given the short turnaround to Melbourne, Walkinshaw replied: \u201cThere\u2019s work to do, but we should be good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Pic: Walkinshaw TWG Racing<\/p>\n

The way in which the Toyota delivers its power also remains an area of improvement, while speed trap data at times across the Sydney 500 seemed to rank the Supras towards the bottom.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s definitely not perfect compared to the other two engines we\u2019re fighting against,\u201d said Walkinshaw.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still have work to do there with Supercars who have been incredibly supportive of what we need to do, no different to the fact that it took two years for the Ford engine to match the GM engine in this category.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not exactly where we want it to be yet but we have got the best guys in the business working on it and we\u2019re not a million miles away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walkinshaw TWG duo Wood and Chaz Mostert<\/a> will enter Albert Park sixth and 13th in the championship, with Brad Jones Racing Toyota trio Cameron Hill<\/a>, Andr\u00e9 Heimgartner and Macauley Jones<\/a> sitting ninth, 17th and 19th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WALKINSHAW TWG Racing has little more than a week to regroup after a mixed start for its Supra…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500377,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-500376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}