YOU CAN forget the Supercars’ tiresome stick-versus-paddle shift debate: Before Gen III comes to pass, Ford’s next Bathurst winner could be – pause for dramatic effect – an automatic.

Don’t refresh the page or fire up on the socials about a typo because you read that correctly.

Before DJR or Tickford send their Mustang’s into battle next year, Ford’s next best hope to win a Mount Panorama enduro will feature a car where the driver need not select their own gears at all.

Fret not, however, because what it represents harks back to the good old days of ‘showroom showdowns’, when enterprising teams would try to find an advantage in their road-going products to make the racing versions even better.

The car, of course, is the brand-new FN Ford Mustang GT built by Garry Rogers Motorsport for George Miedecke and Marcos Ambrose’s upcoming campaign on the Hi-Tec Oils Bathurst 6 Hour.

These are people that know what they are doing when it comes to extracting performance from a racing car at Mount Panorama – and the support of the folks at Herrod Performance, known for their fettling of fast Ford’s – won’t hurt, either.

The decision to shift to Auto power came after Miedecke raced Mustang with a standard six-speed Manual gearbox in last year’s six-hour.

Teaming with Supercar ace Brodie Kostecki and Paul Morris, the trio finished fifth outright and won their class for normally aspirated vehicles – but were comprehensively beaten by the still dominant BMW brigade that has yet to be toppled in Bathurst’s Easter enduro.

These days, the BMWs are fast and reliable with much of the credit going to Beric Lynton’s hard-working Queensland team, who have spent years navigating their way around limp-home modes and complicated factory electronics to make the current M3s and M4s arguably the most effective production-based racing cars Bathurst has ever seen.

“One of the limitations of the FN Mustang is that the gearbox is a bit different than the FM, the previous generation car. The FN has a lot more horsepower, but you can’t use it,” Miedecke told the On the Grid Podcast last week.

“We’ve found that at Eastern Creek, you drive it in third and fourth only. Second is very short, third a bit longer than you’d like, and fourth gear is super long.

“Even at Bathurst we were only using 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th, and only using 5^th on Conrod Straight.

“Whatever horsepower advantage we had was negated by the fact that it was being soaked up by that drivetrain and by the gearing. The car was really hard to get out of the cutting and we were losing a lot of time.”

The lap times suggest George isn’t wrong: Miedecke’s sublime 2m28.0292s best in qualifying, comfortably the quickest a Mustang Production Car has ever gone at Mount Panorama, was a full 2.5 seconds slower than Shane van Gisbergen’s flying 2m25.4399s pole position lap.

Canny strategy and a lot of Safety Car laps kept the ‘Stang on the lead lap, but over the distance it couldn’t stand up to the raw pace of the BMWs.

Explained Miedecke: “We had a look at the ratios and we found that if we went to the (closer ratio manual) Mach 1 gearing we might save about 1.8 seconds, which is a lot at Bathurst.

“But then we looked at the 10-speed auto and the advantage is even greater. Hopefully it’s going to be a bit of a performance thing for us.”

With the existing car sold – to well known Production Car racer Chris Delfsma – the decision was taken to build a new car, with GRM engaged during the peak Covid-19 lockdowns in 2021 when they had workshop time top spare.

Miedecke understates things when he says ‘a bit of a performance thing’. A 1.8 second or more gain in a car driven by he and a bloke called Ambrose automatically shifts – pardon the pun – the potential of the Mustang from ‘miles away’ to ‘almost there’ in terms of lap speed potential.

Early testing has gone well, if not perfectly, but such is life when trialing something brand new in motorsport – not something that often happens in this era of spec racing and samey-samey gear for all.

“Ultimately, it’s a bit of a jump into the unknown, I don’t know that anyone has raced a 10R80 transmission before, but it’s in the F150 raptor and it’s handled much more horsepower than we’re asking it to, and initial results are pretty promising.

“We have to work on some oil surge issues and I think once we get them sorted we should be good.”

Will the BMWs be toppled by this innovative engineering solution from GRM? It’s very hard to say: The BMWs are so reliable, so bulletproof these days that it’s very hard to see a scenario where they can be beaten on outright speed.

But even if they aren’t beaten, at least they’ll need to look over their shoulder at what is shaping up as the best bet yet for something other than a German car to claim a Production Car enduro at Bathurst in more than a decade.

And best of all, it’s a nod to the olden days where the road going product has real relevance to what wins on Sunday.