CHAZ HAS A NEW TOY
Chaz Mostert is unwrapping an early Christmas present today.
It's the all-new Ford Mustang GT he will race in the 2025 Supercars championship with Walkinshaw Andretti United.
Mostert will be cutting laps at Winton in his final hit-out of the year during a driver-evaluation day for WAU.
The new car is only his second fresh seat since the start of the Gen3 era in Supercars and is replacing the Mustang he drove to third place in the 2025 championship which recently sold at auction for collection in coming months.
Ahead of his opening laps, Mostert told Race.news he is not expecting any major change in the new car.
"I don't really expect it to be much different," Mostert told Race.news.
"We were very competitive with the old car so this one should be much the same."
"We're not expecting anything big."
Even so, there could be minor differences with the new car compared with the old one.
"Every time you have a car you expect it to fatigue a bit over time," he said.
The car is only the third new Mustang from the WAU stable and has been built up from a spare chassis which has been kept at the team's base in Melbourne.
"We're one of the only teams that campaigned the same Gen3 car over two years," he said.
"This one was a spare chassis that's been sitting around for most of the year. I don't know the plan for the future chassis, because obviously there is other stuff on the horizon."
Unlike some other drivers, Mostert says he does not name his cars – and it's nothing sentimental. Instead, it's a very businesslike decision.
"One day you could be like Jamie Whincup and have success and want to buy the car back just for its name."
Mostert said the early track time with the car, even though he is limited to 60 kilometres, will give WAU a head start on 2025.
"The plan was always to roll it out for next year. We're getting the shakedown done before the end of the year so it's not a rush.
"I will get around 20 laps. We'll probably just be doing some installation laps and correlation work. We want to make sure the car lines up perfectly."
While Mostert is focussed on his new ride, the rest of the WAU crew is doing junior evaluation at Winton for both Super2 and Toyota GR86 drives in 2025.
"They are the prospects for next year, continuing our work with the Foundation Academy," the WAU team principal, Carl Faux, told Race.news
"We've got a seat to fill in Super2 alongside Campbell Logan. We're looking at Kaleb Ngatoa, a Kiwi we assessed a couple of years ago when we were looking at Ryan Wood.
"There is also Tom Hayman, who is a young GT driver, and Clay Richards, who was pretty impressive in the 86 category this year.
"Matt Hillyer, who was our Academy driver this year, is already on the path. He won't be doing 86 again next year so this is his opportunity to impress."
Ryan Wood will open the assessment with 10 laps in one of WAU's Super2 cars, setting a benchmark time for the other drivers to target as they work through a full day with the squad.
"We'll see who comes out of that," said Faux.
