Australian Touring Cars Gone International?

There’s Trouble in The Hills Mate.

 There’s a bit of trouble in the air when you find out that our sacred Australian V8 Touring Car race has been infiltrated yet again, and this time, it’s by the Germans. It was announced about 4 to 5 months ago that Japanese automaker Nissan had put in a bid to race in V8 Supercars. With new regulations, and such they were able to slot in a NISMO tuned, Infiniti M56 V8 powered 2013 Altima into the mix. Now the German’s want a crack at our beloved sport. Apparently the engineers at AMG, and Mercedes Benz were so bored with their lives, that they needed to find another way to piss off more Aussies. Bad enough their cars are tremendously expensive, now they gotta go, and do this crap. Anyway the latest entry to find it’s way into the ranks of the Australian Supercar sector is none other than a AMG tuned V8 powered 2013 Mercedes Benz E63 Saloon. It sounds very posh if you ask me, but just about any Merc sounds like a million dollars once you finished saying it’s name.

                                                            The German’s Are Coming!

 So this new 2013 E63 promises to be one more car that wants to snatch a title, or two from the well known Ford Falcon, or Holden Commodore. For what we know now, is that there will three cars entered into V8 races, and they are all built by a company called Erebus. They seem to specialize in building purpose built race cars, and this time around the have AMG as their client. The building of these cars signifies that this will be one of the first times that AMG has had a race car built outside of Germany. So, being that this is new news to us all, the specs sheet on the Mercs is small but still slightly informative. The three E63’s will be sporting highly AMG tuned V8 motors that make up to, but are limited to 650hp (485Kw of power). These motors are also limited to being stroked up to no more than 5.0L each. This some what puts all the cars on an even keel. Nevertheless, the Mercedes, and Nissan may have a small advantage of the Commodores, and Falcons. They will be coming with some newly developed transmissions, and highly adjustable suspension for all of the twists, and turns that the various Australian courses have to offer.

Shut It Down Boss.

 Here’s the bottom line. Australian racers have not had to see a Nissan in their races for over 40 years now, and now they have to deal with the likes of these two big names coming to rub elbows. I can see it, but I don’t have to like it. The tracks of Australia need to be open to more competition, but all I can say is that the hometown boys are going to have to step up their game seriously. Because they have a real world international fight coming to their front door step. Be sure to watch the arrival of the new competition at the first race, the Clipsal 500, on 2/16/2013, where it takes place at Sydney Motorsport Park .