Brad Jones has laid out a damage report from his team's New Zealand Supercars double-header that reads less like a race weekend and more like a gravel-rally recovery, with the BJR boss showing fans the suspension arms, uprights and rock-pierced radiators his crew dragged home from Ruapuna.
The Christchurch round was supposed to be a controlled shake-down for Brad Jones Racing's transition to the Toyota GR Supra, but the loose surface at the exit of Turn 3 turned the rear of the field into a panel-beating exercise. Jones used a damage walkthrough to spell out exactly what the team is replacing as it heads into the upcoming Tasmania round.
He started with the steering arms on the Car 8 Supra, broken in race two of the weekend.
"This is off car eight. This was damaged in race two. It's a steering arm. And these are built to take a hit," Jones said. "So they bend rather than damage something further down the line. So instead of damaging the rack, which is quite expensive, it'll just bend this arm. It still takes the car out of the race, but at least it doesn't damage the most expensive part."
The sister car, Car 14, came back in worse shape. "These are all the suspension arms off car 14," Jones said, holding up a stack of components. "You can see a bit more steering arm here. You can see where it's torn that eye out of the top of that one. This bottom arm is really badly damaged."
"One of the things that was pretty bad were the size of the rocks," Jones said. "So when you have these things getting pelted at you, it makes a bit of difference. One of these came down through the brake duct and got caught in here and damaged that."
He then showed how the impacts had reshaped the radiator mesh itself, deforming what should have been a uniform protective lattice into a buckled mess. The damage to the cooling core behind it was the moment the night unravelled for the team.
"We replaced the radiator on the Saturday night," Jones said. "It looked just like this, but the rock hit it so hard that it put a hole in the radiator. But it was embedded so deep that when the guys had to jack it out with a screwdriver - and then it started leaking fluid."
Beyond the parts cost, the damage walkthrough is a quiet pointer to a broader Supercars conversation about Ruapuna's surface and the safety zones at the exits of its faster corners. The Albury team is not the only one to come home with rock damage from the Christchurch weekend, and Jones made clear he expects the venue to address the issue before the championship returns.
"Hopefully we'll get that tidied up a bit so it's not as bad next year when you go off the road," he said.
For BJR, the immediate task is straightforward. Components like the steering arms and front uprights are designed to fail before more expensive structures, so the team is rebuilding rather than reshelling. The Supra programme is still finding its feet, and a brutal Ruapuna outing has, if nothing else, given the engineering group a vivid stress-test of which parts of the new car can take a hit and which need rethinking before the championship next races on the loose stuff.
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