Shane van Gisbergen led the calls for better heat protection in the cockpit following the three practice sessions on the streets of Newcastle today.
The 188 centimetre tall driver felt his feet were too close to the firewall in the tighter confines of the Gen3 Camaro and told media he was concerned about burns during tomorrow's 250-kilometre race.
His concerns were based on an instruction from Supercars yesterday evening to remove additional heat shielding that had been put in place by his Triple Eight team.
"I'm struggling in the car," said van Gisbergen.
"It's so, so hot. It's the hottest car I've driven in a long time. And they made us take all the heat stuff out last night that we'd put in.
"It's crazy. If I wriggle my toes I'm touching the firewall. They extended the cabin bit, so that cabin bit is further into the engine bay now. Hopefully they let us do something."
Supercars wasted little time responding to the pleas from van Gisbergen, Head of Motorsport Adrian Burgess confirming that additional heat protection will be allowed tomorrow.
"There was a concern from Shane; he’s clearly very sensitive to it and he’s got here and his feet are getting very hot," said Burgess.
"We can’t just ignore it. I went and spoke with the majority of drivers and there’s a handful saying ‘yes, let’s do it’; there’s a lot saying ‘we’re fine, we don’t need anything’.
"We can’t just make the ones who are sensitive to it suffer, so we consulted with a few of the teams and most of the drivers and tonight we’ll allow them to wrap the secondaries [exhaust piping].
"The secondaries run very close to the cabin underneath the cabin so we’ll allow them to wrap the secondaries and put more heat shielding around the bulkhead.
"It was something on our agenda to discuss after the event, how everyone fared, but we’re happy to bring that forward.
"The event is probably a little bit hotter than we thought it was going to be last week. It’s a big day tomorrow, 95 laps, we have got to make sure we look after our drivers so if we were going to allow it next week, why wouldn’t we allow it tonight."
Clarifying why T8 was told to remove its head shielding ahead of practice, Burgess explained that there is a potential performance advantage.
"There’s lots of different ways of ceramic coating exhausts, sealing exhausts, and it actually gives you an engine performance improvement," he said.
"When you have got five different engine builders, we made sure tested the exhaust systems with that particular engine to make sure we got the right [Accumulated Engine Power], so it does have an effect on an engine but we’re doing it equal to everybody so that it’s in a more controlled circumstance.
"And equally the last [Technical Working Group] meeting, 99 per cent of the room said leave it alone, we don’t need it, and that has since changed since we got here."
