Aussie Racing Cars added a wicker bill to the top of its cars at The Bend.
At the latest round, where the series played support to Supercars and The Bend 500, a 135 millimetre roof flap was added to every competitor’s car.
The idea was to create more drag, and thus more disturbed air, in a bid to enable better slipstreaming opportunities.
The consequence of that was an ill-handling car through the turns, which proved tough to tame for drivers.
Ultimately, category management dumped the device by the end of Friday after it was tested in the first race of the weekend.
Taking to social media, McKay defended category management for introducing the measure on short notice.
“Aussie Racing Cars is trying to come out here and produce the closest racing they can,” said McKay.
“They want to get it even closer than what it is, which is something I really appreciate.
“They didn’t just put this on here and go, ‘Oh, we wanna screw everything that’s going on’. They had a thought process, and this was a testing period.
“The best way to test it is to go to a round and get everyone to drive it and everyone to go through there.”
A Perspex flap added to an Aussie Racing Car. Image: InSyde Media
McKay said that drafting with the device “wasn’t necessarily any better” and that it unsettled the cars.
“We found that we had a lot of entry-to-corner overseer, snap oversteer, and middle-corner oversteer,” he explained.
“So a lot of the flowing corners around (The Bend), especially the fast ones, the triple-right up the back, and the right-handers all around there, were very difficult to drive the car.
“These cars are extremely hard to hold onto. The wing does a lot of work to try and keep the back balanced.”
To account for the roof flap, McKay said his team took a fairly large swing at the car’s setup. That meant stiffening the front suspension and softening the rear.
They quickly found the car had reached its setup limit.
“The problem we found is going through qualifying into the races, we threw more at it and we ran out of adjustment,” said McKay.
“There was no more adjustment to be had from the car. It was getting better, the lap times were getting better, people were getting more comfortable to it, but we were still at the extreme.
“If we had wet weather, if we had a change in track surfaces, that was really gonna disturb what was going on.”
McKay commended the category for taking on the feedback of its drivers and electing to remove the roof flap at the end of Friday.
He said there may be more experiments with the concept in future.