Blow to title leader as big crash ends practice; huge effort saves Ford’s Bathurst: Talking Points

For a day of exclusively non-competitive running, Thursday at Bathurst had a bit of everything.

It had a spectacular spin and save, with Warren Luff losing control of his car on the run down the mountain but miraculously keeping it out of the barriers, invoking every gram of his Movie World stunt driving skills to live another lap.

It had a big crash for the title-leading car, opening the tiniest of chinks in the armour of Will Brown’s championship lead.

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It even had a brief wildlife exhibition, with a snake slithering onto the circuit and forcing a delayed start to second practice — which had already been pushed back thanks to an oil spill from a heritage banger earlier in the day.

But despite the various complications, the pace was rapid.

A quirk of this year’s calendar means the sport has already visited Mount Panorama this year, having opened the season at the storied track.

Almost every car set significantly faster times on Thursday than they did on practice Friday in February.

The average improvement was a thumping 0.743 seconds — and that’s without the co-drivers getting a swing at the track in the cool of the early evening thanks to the red flag.

While there’ll be no touching last year’s Bathurst 1000 for ultimate speed given the harder tyre compound being used this year, if that rate of improvement continues, the battle for pole should be fought at around 2 minutes 5.5 seconds.

But there’s a lot of water to go under the bridge between now and then.

For Triple Eight the immediate concern will be how damaged its title-leading car is after it was launched into the concrete barriers at the Cutting.

PYE PUTS TITLE-LEADING CAR IN THE WALL IN EARLY BROWN BLOW

If you’re going to crash at Mount Panorama in the championship-leading car, it’s best to get it over with early.

At least that’s what Scott Pye and his Triple Eight team will be thinking on Thursday night with a significant repair job on the cards.

Pye’s off at the Cutting with just over 10 minutes to go in the final session of the day was no minor off. Sliding wide as his car broke free of his control, he whacked the outside barrier with his right-rear tyre, causing significant damage to that corner of the car.

He also damaged the front-right of his Sandown-winning 87 Camaro.

It was the culmination of a somewhat scrappy session for Will Brown’s co-driver, having speared off the road at the Chase earlier, albeit with dropped oil likely to have played a role.

“Ego’s a bit hurt,” Pye told Fox Sports. “I just made a mistake.

“The Cutting’s tricky. I don’t think I was off line that much, but I just lost the rear and that was it, it was game over.

“Hopefully I haven’t done too much damage, but I feel terrible for Will and the crew. Luckily it’s the last session of the day and they can fix it overnight hopefully.”

Pye jumped out of the car and poked his head into the space vacated by the right-rear wheel to appraise the damage for himself, but his inspection was inconclusive.

“The Gen3 can sometimes be a bit of a tin can in the chassis rail,” he said. “I just wanted to check the rear and kind of ease the gut maybe and see if there’s any damage there.

“It doesn’t look like the chassis rails at the back are damaged, but we’ll see what’s happened at the front — I went in pretty hard I think.

“Sometimes you can get lucky, sometimes you can get unlucky with the damage. At the end of the day it’s my mistake, and I’m sorry to everyone that has to now work to fix my screw-up.”

The good news for Pye and Triple Eight is that they lost no running relative to the rest of the field, with the red flag ending the session.

There are also still two hours of practice to go before qualifying on Friday and four hours more in total for the weekend.

But confidence is everything at Bathurst — it’s why drivers get so-much non-competitive seat time over the weekend.

That’s particularly true of the co-drivers, almost all of whom haven’t raced a Gen3 car this year.

And of course a big crash like this generates inevitable unknowns. What if some unseen damage has been done to the chassis that isn’t detected until later in the weekend or hampers performance all the way to Sunday?

Plus there’s the inevitable fatigue for the mechanics that’ll come with a late-night rebuild of the car, putting the Brown and Pye side of the garage on the back foot.

A crash in what turned out to be the final seconds of practice on Friday isn’t a disaster, and the situation is clearly recoverable.

But Pye and title leader Brown will have to work that much harder to get back on level terms from here.

NIGGLES HAMSTRING TITLE CONTENDER ON TRUNCATED DAY

Ironically Pye’s off might prove more damaging to one of Brown’s chief rivals than it will for him and his lead driver.

Chaz Mostert and Lee Holdsworth’s day ended in forgettable fashion, the 2021 Bathurst winners accumulating just 17 laps, the fewest of any driver combination.

Holdsworth clocked up just three laps in FP2 thanks to an exhaust valve problem. He was kept in his garage until the last 15 minutes, which turned into just five minutes and three laps before Pye’s crash ended running.

The WAU duo ended the day 10th and 0.268 seconds off the pace but with a mountain of work to do to build confidence ahead of Sunday.

Thomas Randle and Tyler Everingham were also hamstrung in their mission to rack up mileage, with a power steering issue triggering a lengthy garage stay for the former in the first session for a parts change, limiting him to 10 laps.

Everingham managed the same count in the second session thanks to the red flag truncating what should have been close to an hour of running.

Despite the low lap count, the Tickford combination was eighth and 0.209 seconds off the benchmark.

Will Davison and Kai Allen completed only three more laps, logging 23 for the day, thanks to mysterious overheating issues that restricted them to 11 and 12 laps across sessions respectively.

Allen was at least able to set something like a representative time in the second session, albeit it left car 17 more than 1.5 seconds off the pace.

Mark Winterbottom and Michael Caruso were the only other drivers to log so few laps, limiting themselves to 23 for Team 18.

WORLDWIDE EFFORT SOLVES FORD ENGINE DRAMA

The competitiveness of the Ford teams was under a cloud ahead of the sport’s biggest race after a spate of engine failures in recent weeks forced the Blue Oval into a sudden redesign of its crankshafts.

The solution was to pinch designs used by the GT3 Mustang, but that was the easy part. Finding them, buying them and getting them to Bathurst just weeks after the problem was identified was far harder.

Initially there were concerns teams wouldn’t get their hands on the updated engine — which was approved by Supercars in advance — until late on Friday, potentially hampering their build-up to the weekend and perhaps even qualifying.

But a herculean effort by the American auto giant and homologation team Dick Johnson Racing ensured most teams had time to change most engines over to the new-spec part in time for first practice, with the full allocation of motors distributed by the end of the day.

The size of that task must not be underestimated, with the entire Ford-engined world scoured for spares in recent weeks.

The 10 crankshafts that arrived in Bathurst on Thursday were bought from the United States and the UK and had to detour via Japan, where they were balanced to meet the specifications of the Supercars engine.

To put it into context, Ford had already been considering changing crankshafts following signs of potential issues earlier in the year. The earliest it expected to be able to do it was 2025.

But the in-race failure at the Sandown 500 and subsequent expiries in a post-race drive day meant all stops had to be pulled out to ensure Ford could be confident its cars would be competitive and reliable on the sport’s biggest stage.

Efforts to find new parts were paired with a quietly conducted series of tests to try to identify the exact cause of the failures, including a run at Ford’s testing facility in Little River, north of Geelong, and then a 1000-kilometre test at Queensland Raceway.

At some stage or other all Ford teams have pitched in to identify the problem or work on its solution — a considerable diversion when full focus is normally on preparing to get the most out of Bathurst.

“It’s been a huge effort by not only the DJR guys, but also Ford,” motorsport general manager Tim Edwards told the Supercars website. “Each one of the Ford teams have all contributed after the issues they had at Sandown.

“I can’t emphasise enough the efforts that Ford and every one of their teams have put in to overcome this, with donation of labour and donation of cars. For example, we saw the Blanchard car brought up for testing at Queensland Raceway.

“It’s been a real collaborative effort by all the teams. Grove mechanics actually flew up to run that Blanchard car with DJR engineers.

“It’s been fantastic to see them all aligned and working together for the common good.”

COMBINED TIMES, THURSDAY PRACTICE

1. Matt Payne/Garth Tander: 2:07.294 (34 laps)

2. Cam Waters/James Moffat: +0.037 seconds (26 laps)

3. Will Brown/Scott Pye: +0.037 seconds (33 laps)

4. Cameron Hill/Cameron Crick: +0.175 seconds (32 laps)

5. Broc Feeney/Jamie Whincup: +0.185 seconds (32 laps)

6. Thomas Randle/Tyler Everingham: +0.209 seconds (20 laps)

7. Craig Lowndes/Cooper Murray: +0.222 seconds (29 laps)

8. James Golding/David Russell: +0.229 seconds (31 laps)

9. David Reynolds/Warren Luff: +0.238 seconds (25 laps)

10. Chaz Mostert/Lee Holdsworth: +0.268 seconds (17 laps)

11. Richie Stanaway/Dale Wood: +0.320 seconds (30 laps)

12 Jack Le Brocq/Jayden Ojeda: +0.371 seconds (31 laps)

13. Bryce Fullwood/Jaylyn Robotham: +0.451 seconds (34 laps)

14. Anton De Pasquale/Tony D’Alberto: +0.584 seconds (33 laps)

15. Brodie Kostecki/Todd Hazelwood: +0.659 seconds (31 laps)

16. Andre Heimgartner/Declan Fraser: +0.760 seconds (31 laps)

17. Macauley Jones/Jordan Boys: +0.836 seconds (30 laps)

18. Aaron Love/Aaron Cameron: +0.862 seconds (29 laps)

19. Jaxon Evans/Dean Fiore: +0.910 seconds (28 laps)

20. Ryan Wood/Fabian Coulthard: +1.033 seconds (26 laps)

21. Nick Percat/Dylan O’Keeffe: +1.255 seconds (29 laps)

22. James Courtney/Jack Perkins: +1.422 seconds (31 laps)

23. Will Davison/Kai Allen: +1.579 seconds (23 laps)

24. Mark Winterbottom/Michael Caruso: +1.602 seconds (23 laps)

25. Tim Slade/Cameron McLeod: +1.676 seconds (33 laps)

26. Matt Chahda/Bradley Vaughan: +1.850 seconds (35 laps)