Triple Eight team manager Mark Dutton has lifted the lid on exactly what it took to rebuild Broc Feeney's Supercars Mustang in four days after the Queensland driver's heavy shunt at Taupo, confirming that the Gen3 centre cell came through the incident completely intact.
Speaking to Supercars' Hino Hub technical segment alongside a full CAD breakdown of the car, Dutton appeared on camera with his left arm in a sling, the result of an arm-wrestling match with Feeney himself.
"I beat Broc with the right hand, but when I went to the left hand, he's a strong little bugger," Dutton said. "He snapped it out. Awkward carry, a little bit heavy, and popped the tendon off the bone. Fortunately had a really good surgeon attach it and here we are."
The bigger technical story was how the Banyo-based squad turned Feeney's wrecked Mustang around in four days between Taupo and the following round. Dutton walked through the damage list methodically, starting with the obvious and ending with components that required factory verification.
The body panels around the right-hand side and the front of the car were destroyed and unrepairable, all replaced. The radiator and associated front ducting were gone. The engine itself was undamaged but was pulled out and swapped as a precaution, a standard Triple Eight approach that reflects the race against time on a four-day turnaround.
"The last thing we wanted to do was rebuild the whole car in four days, and then find there's a little bit of a bent component or something that didn't rear its head straight away," Dutton said. "So precautionary, swap that out. Safety measure."
The front clip, which carries the full front suspension, was removed but came back clean. Dutton confirmed it was still sent back to Triple Eight's Banyo manufacturing facility for laser measurement to ensure nothing had moved by even a millimetre. The right-side front suspension was replaced in full.
The most interesting structural story was at the rear. Dutton revealed that Feeney's decision to keep his foot in the throttle and spin the car on impact, which drew public criticism at the time, actually saved the car from catastrophic damage.
"The funny thing with the way Brock, he copped obviously a bit of flak for keeping the boot in it and spinning the car, he actually saved the car from getting massive damage," Dutton explained. "All the damage happened to the rear and actually going rearward. It pulled the rear clip rearward instead of a concertina effect into the centre cell."
The rear clip itself was dead and was swapped out, along with the transaxle. Critically, the centre cell, the safety structure around the driver, required zero repair work.
"The Gen3 car and model totally did its job," Dutton said. "Centre cell perfect."
The detail matters for the wider championship. Feeney went on to take the Jason Richards Memorial Trophy at Ruapuna the following weekend after Ryan Wood's late engine failure, and the speed with which Triple Eight returned a crash-damaged chassis to winning condition points to a repair workflow few other teams in pit lane can match. It also serves as an endorsement of the Gen3 car's structural philosophy, where componentry is modular enough to swap complete subassemblies rather than rebuild from scratch.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/mark-dutton-feeney-ford-taupo-rebuild-triple-eight-supercars-2026). Visit for full coverage.*