What makes an ideal Supercars season opener?

If you chose a narrow, high-speed street circuit lined by walls, oppressed by a high ambient temperature and threatened by thunderstorms, then you might be about to get exactly what you’re after.

This weekend’s season-opening Newcastle 500 will feature all the above, and as a bonus, no-one will really have driven the all-new cars in anger before they hit the track.

It’s a recipe for action if ever there’s been one.

“It’s going to be crazy,” Cam Waters tells. “Newcastle is a really crazy track. It’s super-fast, and you can’t make mistakes, so to take a brand-new car to that joint is pretty crazy.

“[Rain] is going to throw a spanner in the works as well.

“It’s going to be a massive weekend and a super exciting one, I think. The cars are finally out on the grid racing. They look awesome. It’s going to be a show.

“There’ll be plenty that goes down, I reckon.”

The quantity of unknowns is exceptionally high at the dawn of a new era for the championship. There’s speculation that the reliability rate — or should that read unreliability rate? — will turn the first round of the year into something of a lottery. And there’s the simple fact that, having not raced around these demanding streets since before pandemic, the scope for mistakes is high.

It’s the sort of weekend at which cooler heads are sure to prevail — but they’re not always in surplus once drivers are behind the wheel.

“I don’t think all the field are going to change their approach,” Waters says. “Some people are just going to go hammer and tongs and think of it as an opportunity to get a result.

“Other people might be a bit smarter and make sure they finish.”

And to finish first, first you must finish — so the saying goes.

Waters is about to embark on his eighth full-time Supercars campaign, two of the last three of which have seen him finish runner-up in the championship, first to Scott McLaughlin and last year to Shane van Gisbergen.

The 28-year-old must be hoping that third time’s a charm.

On some level second place must have been frustrating beyond the obvious. By any standards Waters had the sort of season that probably would’ve won him a title in ordinary circumstances — that is, circumstances not featured Van Gisbergen in such red-hot form.

Despite some early-second problems for the Tickford team, he turned in comfortably the most consistent season of any driver behind the leader.

Though his tally of three wins was shaded by Chaz Mostert’s five (and Van Gisbergen’s 21), he matched his WAU rival for podiums and finished outside the top eight only once between Melbourne and Adelaide. He also took the most poles of any driver.

Consistency is the name of the game in any championship, and it was a welcome return to regularity after an underwhelming 2021 season.

“It was a good season for us from where we had been,” he says. “We highlighted issues and what we would have liked to have improved for last year, and I think we achieved a lot of them.

“We were consistently up the front, we had heaps of podiums, we got a few wins, and second was great.

“It’s not what we wanted, but it wasn’t a bad year.

“But we probably just did not achieve enough or go far enough to catch that 97 car.”

The problem with trying to catch a runaway title favourite is that the target is always moving further away. The leader always has a head start; you must move more quickly just to draw level, never mind to completely overhaul them.

But part of that equation has solved itself in 2023 with the introduction of the all-new car. Everyone is starting equal — equal points, equal car understanding, equal potential.

“This year is going to have its own unique challenges with the Gen3 car coming in, but how you work within the team, the processes and a lot of those things will remain the same, so you need to make sure you are hitting those goals and understanding that the Gen3 car will be a side part of it,” he says.

“[To improve] you highlight what you did, good and bad, the previous year and you just try and keep doing the things you did well and improve those negatives.

“Some of those negatives are probably gone because of Gen3, and then there are other things as a team we can continue to do better or we didn’t do good enough.”

The potential for big swings in performance is also something being considered as teams develop their understanding of the machinery and learn to make the most of it.

In that sense Tickford could be very well placed to steal and early march thanks to its stable of four competitive cars.

“That does help generating data and zoning in on what we need quicker,” Waters says. “But I don’t think anyone’s put their best foot forward. People are still learning.

“You will see people learn really quickly and might go from the back to the front quickly at rounds or from round to round.

“I think your good teams, good drivers, will end up at the front. It’ll just depend on how quickly.

“It’s about working the two parallels with the Gen3 and the human part of it to make sure you tick all the boxes, and once you’ve ticked all the boxes, that’s when you can go for championships.”

And with a little momentum in the bank from last year, Waters is cautiously optimistic that this could finally be the year the pieces click into place for him and his Tickford team.

“I feel pretty confident that we’re ticking as many boxes as we can as a team and doing everything we think we can to go after that championship,” he said. “We’ve come second a few times, and the same at Bathurst. We’ve been right up there

“We’re not far away. We just need to keep improving bits and pieces, and hopefully this is the year.”