I have been pondering about the enormous time. money and energy expended by Todd Kelly to re-invent the Mustang. There were already two significant versions.
The Tickford cars have arguably been the best in the field with the Mustang and even the preceding Falcon. Indications are that Tickford were willing to assist, presumably for a fee, Todd to build his new cars to replace the Nissans.
DJR/Penske had, again arguably, had the best organisation, aided by a seriously superb driver. I cannot recall any significant offer of assistance to Todd. The cars they sold to MSR were, frankly, uncompetitive duds when withot DJR/Penske assistance.
The Cooldrive team, on the other hand had some success, with Tickford based cars, engines and assistance.
Had Todd been able to simply purchase Tickford's cars, or their design, and if he had not stubbornly decided that he had to re-invent the Ford Racing engine, The team would have saved, in my estimation, a lot of money and been initially more competitive.
End of nostalgia!
The beauty of Gen 3 is that there are only two designs of Supercar, with mostly common parts and the differences, such as the body, subject to extensive parity type adjustments, prior to manufacture.
Has Gen 3 been in place, the Kelly family would have saved a lot of money on cars and probably been more competritive.
All teams, theoretically can buy a competitive racecar as a starting point and know that the vendor will not suddenly make a major engineering improvement in the cars that the supply team races.
All we then have, as a variance, is the quality of drivers and engineers.
888 seem to be the go to team to recruit well trained engineering staff with many of their engineers commencing from University and being trained. 888 also assist. at a price, other GM teams. Will DJR, for example be willing to assist their near neighbours, MSR?
