After the highest of highs at the Sandown 500, Pye came crashing back down to earth in the first co-driver practice on Thursday afternoon.
Pye, by his own admission, made a mistake on approach to The Cutting and lost control of the Chevrolet Camaro.
The Red Bull racer went rearward into the concrete wall and tore the right rear wheel from its mounting point.
The worst damage appeared to be the right rear, and at the conclusion of practice, the team went to work to repair the damage.
“We’ll have a debrief tonight. We’ll tell him to keep his chin up,” said team principal Whincup.
“We can fix cars. That’s what we do. There’s no stress at all. Hopefully, it doesn’t hurt his confidence, which I’m sure it won’t.
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“You’ve just got to have a really bad memory,” he joked.
“If you’re too intelligent, that doesn’t work for you. You’ve just got to forget about it.
“Have some ice cream tonight and move on.”
Big damage for the #87 in Practice 😣
🎥 @Fox_Motorsport #RedBullAmpol pic.twitter.com/PtmJQwXquY— Red Bull Ampol Racing (@redbullampol) October 10, 2024
The second practice of the day was delayed twice. The first was for a large oil spill down the length of Conrod Straight into The Chase caused by the preceding Heritage Revival.
An ex-Allan Moffat Mazda RX-7 suffered a spectacular engine failure before spinning on its own oil at The Chase.
Once that was cleaned up a brown snake found its way onto the track before being caught by a trackside worker.
“I didn’t think we were going to get out,” said Whincup.
“Thank god for that marshall slash snake wrangler. If we were waiting for someone from town we wouldn’t have got out.
“I’ll go shout him a six-pack later on.”
Whincup ended up topping Practice 2 ahead of the Triple Eight Race Engineering wildcard of Cooper Murray and Erebus Motorsport’s Jayden Ojeda.
It was, by Whincup’s account, a fairly standard session.
“We finally got out there. Our car was reasonably good. Went around and around. Just went through our test program,” he said.
“Unfortunately for the other car, it ended up in the fence. I’ve been in there a couple of times and that happens. We’ll fix it and it’ll be brand new overnight and ready to go tomorrow.”
Practice 3 at the Bathurst 1000 gets underway at 10:05am AEDT.
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