Triple Eight Race Engineering has been the benchmark of Australian touring car racing for two decades. Right now, the team that built its reputation on relentless consistency cannot find any.
The Banyo squad left the Townsville 500 stuck in a six-race podium drought stretching back through Darwin — its longest barren run since 2006. The cause is not a mystery so much as a moving target. Over the off-season Triple Eight switched from General Motors to Ford, swapping the Camaro for the Mustang, and the change has stripped away the settled feel that once let Broc Feeney and Will Brown attack every weekend from the front.
Technical director Pete Ringwood offered a rare window into the problem. "We've been talking about toolkit; there's more for us to understand there," Ringwood said. "Sometimes the car is super sensitive, other times it's less sensitive. It's not that we have just forgotten all of our tools. We are finding that the sensitivity of the tools is different."
Part of the difficulty, he explained, is the compressed nature of a modern race weekend, where set-up direction has to be chased in a single practice session on worn tyres. "You're trying to develop your understanding on the sensitivity of tools on old tyres in one practice session," Ringwood said. "It's very hard to walk away from that and confidently say 'that did this' — picking through it is best done at the workshop."
Ringwood was careful not to cry parity. In a category where the field has rarely been tighter, he argued, small errors are punished brutally. "A small misstep anywhere and that's enough to knock you out. That's not shocking," he said. "You look at all the cars around us, they're all strong in their own regards." The flip side, he added, is that Triple Eight can no longer lean on a unique advantage: "We often find the strengths and weaknesses of one car might be the same as yours as well, so it's hard to be different to them to capitalise differently."
Supercars great Craig Lowndes, who spent the best years of his career in Triple Eight colours, was blunt about the state of play in his column. "It's evident that it's hit and miss for them at the moment," Lowndes wrote. "They've had 20 years of strong performance. Now like everyone else, they're searching for how to set up the car."
Lowndes stopped short of absolving the drivers. Feeney, who has openly described the Mustang as hard to drive, and Brown have both bristled at their weekends — but Lowndes framed that frustration as shared ownership rather than grievance. "Broc Feeney and Will Brown are right to feel aggrieved, but they're also part of the solution," he said. His prescription was simple and unforgiving: "At the very least, they have to get consistency back."
The urgency is real because the rest of the grid has moved on without them. Fellow Ford runners Grove Racing, Tickford and Dick Johnson Racing have been extracting more from the Mustang than the marque's supposed flagship, while Matt Payne now leads the championship and Brodie Kostecki and Cam Waters have emerged as the season's form drivers. For a team accustomed to setting the standard, watching others define it is the sharpest indictment of all.
With a break before the category resumes, Triple Eight's answers — as Ringwood conceded — will be found back at the workshop rather than the racetrack. The clock, and the title race, are not waiting.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/triple-eights-ford-slump-deepens-as-lowndes-sounds-warning). Visit for full coverage.*