Will Davison steps in to support the team amidst challenges faced by rookie drivers.
Assisting the Team
[IMAGE0CONTEXT:bmwunknown] Will Davison’s involvement with the team comes as a response to a difficult start for rookie drivers Ryan Tomsett and Ayrton Hodson, who currently rank 20th and 22nd in the series standings after three rounds. Davison joined the team’s rookie test on Wednesday, but due to strict regulations, he was only able to complete a few laps in each car. These restrictions are in place to prevent main game drivers from exploiting these testing days for personal gain.
Both the Supercars Championship and Super2 Series are set to race at the Ipswich venue next week, marking their first return since 2019. “They should allow more [laps], it’s a shame,” Davison expressed to Speedcafe. “You’re allowed 10 laps but because I drove both cars, it was about three in each car, with in and out laps. “[Supercars drivers] don’t get anything out of it. If anything it hampers me going out next weekend; the cars are so different. You’re just trying to help these young kids in Super2. A lot have never driven a Supercar, so they don’t know what it should feel like. Straight away, you notice things that shouldn’t be the way they are, but those guys don’t know any different. Both of their drivers had never driven Supercars and have done a few rounds now, and it’s like ‘is this normal or not?’”
Valuable Insights
[IMAGE1CONTEXT:bmwunknown] Despite the limitations, Davison found the day to be beneficial, identifying “four or five things” to improve after just his first lap. “A little bit was setup stuff between the cars, some brake stuff, the way the pedals and master cylinder are set up—just little things that I could jump from car to car and pick up,” he explained. “They’re very complex cars. The way they’ve got to be put together, particularly when they’ve come out of the hands of a main game team, it’s very easy for little things to not be quite done the right way. I was more than happy to help [team owner] Michael [Anderson], but it’s just so limited. It’s a bit silly that you can’t do any more driving. It’s ridiculous, to be honest.”
Hodson’s Mustang was the same car Davison drove during the 2021 and ’22 seasons, while Tomsett’s vehicle is a DJR Team Penske-era car that was raced in the main game by Fabian Coulthard.
Nostalgia for Gen2 Cars
[IMAGE2CONTEXT:bmw_unknown] Davison remarked that returning to Gen2 machinery felt like “a bit of a trip out.” He noted, “It’s amazing how quickly you adapt to your new surroundings, and all of a sudden what felt like your second home felt very foreign. But I enjoyed getting back in my old car; I really sort of miss them in a lot of ways, to be honest. They’re just great race cars, the end of that Gen2 era. They were at the end of the envelope of development, and there were a lot of freedoms for the engineers to customize the whole build of the car to maximize them.
“Gen3 has come a long way, but they are standard componentry, which is the whole purpose, and there are a lot of compromises on a lot of elements of the car. I miss a lot about the old cars, that’s for sure.”