BJR opened 2026 with brand-new Gen3 Supras under Andre Heimgartner and recruit Cameron Hill, while Macauley Jones has spent the year in a converted Chevrolet Camaro, a stopgap that is common in Supercars but never ideal. Every Gen3 car, regardless of badge, rides on the same control chassis and safety cell; the Camaro, Mustang, and Supra are really three different aero packages wrapped around identical underpinnings. That shared architecture is exactly why a team can convert a car between models without starting from nothing, but it is also why building a genuinely new chassis is such a deliberate, resource-heavy decision rather than something you knock out mid-season on a whim.
The investment has already paid off on track. Heimgartner took his new Supra to victory lane in Tasmania earlier this season, even though engine failures cost him finishes in Sydney and Townsville and now have him fighting just to qualify for the Finals. Elsewhere in the Toyota camp, Chaz Mostert and Ryan Wood have kept their Supras inside the top 10 all year, running under Walkinshaw TWG Racing, the outfit Toyota designated as its homologation team, the group responsible for engineering and certifying the Supra’s Gen3 specification that every Toyota-badged team, including BJR, builds to.
Jones walked through exactly where BJR 021 sits in that build process. “We’re certainly well underway with our next Supra,” he said. “The boys have been beavering away on this while we’ve been away racing. This is, remember, just the centre section. So once this is complete, then the next part of the process is we’ll make a new front clip and a new rear clip, and then it’ll go and get painted.” That sequence, centre section first, then front clip, then rear clip, then paint, is the standard order for building a Gen3 tub, and each step carries more labor than the last. The centre section houses the FIA-style safety cage, and every clip has to be jig-mounted and checked before final assembly so a car built months apart from its sister chassis still lands within the series’ weight and geometry tolerances. That kind of hands-on fabrication is not a new phenomenon in racing; it is the same small-team, trial-and-error ethos that has produced championship-winning race cars for generations.
The target is having BJR 021 ready to race soon after October’s Repco Bathurst 1000, and Jones was upfront about how tight that window really is. “We hope to have this to a point where if we need it post Bathurst, even though it’ll be a rush, we could actually build it into a car,” he said. Translated from race-team speak, the chassis will likely be structurally finished, but turning a bare tub into a fully wired, plumbed, and race-legal Supra, complete with wiring loom, fuel cell, dampers, aero, and livery, is its own multi-week job that cannot be rushed without risking a car that is not ready to survive 500 kilometers at Mount Panorama, let alone win there.
BJR is not alone in refreshing its fleet this year. Triple Eight Race Engineering, Walkinshaw TWG Racing, Dick Johnson Racing, Tickford Racing, Grove Racing, and Erebus Motorsport have all rolled out new Gen3 chassis in 2026, and Tickford has a second one coming for Thomas Randle. That kind of fleet-wide turnover is not cheap, and it is a useful reminder that manufacturer-backed racing budgets can shrink as fast as they grow. Alpine’s decision to abandon the WEC Hypercar class after this season is a case study in how quickly factory enthusiasm for a race category can change.
BJR has not said which car BJR 021 replaces, but the math points toward Macauley Jones’ Camaro, the one holdover from the team’s pre-Supra era. Before that decision needs making, though, BJR has the Ryco Enduro Cup to get through: Bryce Fullwood, Brad Vaughan, and Jordan Boys join Heimgartner, Hill, and Jones respectively as co-drivers when the enduro season opens at The Bend on September 11-13.
It is a strange twist for a nameplate with this much road-car pedigree. A clean MKIV Supra is still coveted enough that collectors are chasing them for six figures, and Toyota keeps investing in the entry-level GR86 to keep its sports car lineup relevant as rivals get heavier. The Gen3 race car wearing the Supra badge shares almost none of that engineering DNA; it is a bespoke tube-frame racer built to a rulebook, not a showroom. But the fact that a small, family-run outfit like Brad Jones Racing is still hand-building entire chassis in-house, rather than buying complete cars off a shelf, says something about how this sport still works underneath all the sponsor decals: paperwork and points systems change constantly, but somebody is still cutting metal in a shed to go fast on a Sunday.
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