Supercars rookie Rylan Gray spent the day on the sidelines as his McLaren 720S was plagued with teething trouble on Friday.
The car sat out Practice 1 in its entirety due to a gear selector failure before a suspension issue popped up in Practice 2.
Speaking with Speedcafe, team owner Josh Hunt said the car could have continued in Practice 2 but chose not to out of an abundance of caution.
“It was actually a bit strange,” Hunt explained.
“It was one of the shifting mechanisms. Yesterday, it did Track to Town, and obviously a test day last week. Everything was fine, but just overnight that decided it wasn’t happy.
“The next one, we just had a bit of movement in the suspension arms at the front, which ended up being pretty benign.
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“Whenever you get something like that on a car that’s pretty fresh to us, we err on the side of caution – especially here.”
Asked whether the team sought additional practice time, Hunt said it was “the first thing we did.”
“I think the email went off two minutes into the first session that we didn’t make,” Hunt laughed.
“They’ve got a job to protect everybody on track, and the driver line-up that we do have is a good one.
“We still have two hours of running before we go into qualifying. Unfortunately for us we won’t get running in that last session, but you know, I understand their (the organiser’s) position too.”
The team only took stock of the car two weeks ago and completed a test day at Queensland Raceway in the week leading up to the Bathurst 12 Hour.
As part of the deal, the team has signed a customer racing agreement with McLaren.
“McLaren has been awesome. They’ve bent over backwards to get us everything that we’ve needed, even to the point of bringing suitcases of parts to the track here, so I can’t thank them enough,” said Hunt.
“We’ve missed a bit of running there, I think some of it probably just being a little bit over cautious. It’s a long weekend and we wanna make sure we get to the end.
“We are pretty lucky we do have one hell of a drive line-up. All four of them are really good, three of them know this place like the back of their hand.”
With its Australian trio relatively experienced despite their age, Hunt isn’t stressed about the lack of laps going into Saturday.
There are two practice sessions scheduled for day two, each an hour long.
If there is one driver who Hunt wants to see in the car as a priority, it’s Jean-Baptiste Simmenauer.
“We need to get JB up to speed. Him as a driver, there are no reservations as to what he can do. It’s just this place, letting him see it, letting him understand it all,” Hunt explained.
“The beauty is we’ve got plenty of tyres, so we’ve got that up our sleeve. That’ll certainly be taken into account.
“I think at this point, having four happy drivers going into the race is the priority.”
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