One of the most surprising aspects of Ford Australia’s decision to pull up stumps and end its funding of V8 Supercars at the end of 2015 is the on-track potential of its teams for the upcoming season.
Its factory team, formerly Ford Performance Racing and now Prodrive Racing Australia, has won the last two Bathurst 1000s with consistent championship challenger Mark Winterbottom and rising star Chaz Mostert as its lead drivers.
Then there’s long-time Ford outfit Dick Johnson Racing (DJR), which welcomes North American racing giant Team Penske as its new majority owners with two-times V8 Supercars champion and NASCAR race-winner Marcos Ambrose returning home after nine years in North America.
It’s a driver and team line-up with the depth and quality to compete for Bathurst and championship wins, and yet Ford Australia is throwing in the towel just as the new and final Falcon, the FG X, makes its racing debut.
The introduction of the FG X is an opportunity for Ford’s teams to claw back on performance and overcome the deficiencies of the preceding FG, which could hold its own against the newer models such as the VF Commodore, Nissan Altima, AMG Mercedes-Benz E63 and Volvo Polestar S60 but was a bit long in tooth.
If Prodrive Racing Australia and DJR Team Penske have nailed the aerodynamic efficiency of the FG X in homologation testing, then the likes of Winterbottom could conceivably challenge for the championship.
After all, despite running the dated FG for six seasons, Winterbottom has finished in the top five in the championship standings in each of those campaigns, on top of his 2013 Bathurst 1000 triumph – the only genuine threat to the dominant Triple Eight Race Engineering.
But the biggest hiccup could be what the dwindling amount of funding coming from Ford Australia has on the teams, as Prodrive Racing Australia looks to a future beyond the Blue Oval, and Team Penske restructures Dick Johnson Racing.
If the FG X proves to be a jet, then Ford Australia could have relinquished a fantastic chance to promote the final Falcon and give the historic nameplate a winning farewell, for the ingredients are there for success with a little help from the manufacturer.
It would go down in history along with the long list of Ford own goals, which has allowed great rival Holden to amass a better head-to-head record in Australian touring cars and establish itself as the current dominator in the series.
Over the years Ford Australia has done its best to squander golden opportunities. It pulled funding from Allan Moffat twice in the seventies, despite his success in head-to-head battles with Holden’s Peter Brock, and never truly backed Dick Johnson despite his immense popularity, while the decision to pull funding from the rising giant Triple Eight because of a disagreement over its colours changed the course of V8 Supercars.
While Holden has secured Triple Eight and factory team Walkinshaw Racing to funded deals with the Commodore nameplate to remain in the marketplace and race on in the series, Ford doesn’t even seem interested in racing the incoming Mustang and keeping alive a link to its heritage.
What an irony it would be, therefore, if the final Falcon can deliver Ford a championship-winning farewell as it turns its back on that potential success.
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