Red Bull Racing Australia manager Mark Dutton says the team will learn from its troubled Bathurst campaign, claiming partial responsibility for Jamie Whincup running out of fuel on the final lap.

While team owner Roland Dane placed the blame squarely on Whincup in the wake of the loss, Dutton has admitted that errors in the team’s fuel calculations also played a role.

Dutton took control of the #1 Holden’s radio channel on the penultimate lap of the race to tell Whincup that “we’re not going to make it” after the driver had failed to react to repeated requests from engineer David Cauchi to slow.

“It’s not from a lack of attention and effort going into it, but we’ve learnt that we can do things better,” explained Dutton on the Red Bull team website.

“The car was full after its last stop – we couldn’t have got more fuel in there.

“The other frontrunners all did stops closer to the end so they all had more fuel in at the end.

“We decided not to do that because we thought we were on target and we were hitting our numbers, but there were some errors with our numbers and we’re not hiding that.

“Jamie had ultimate faith in the team’s numbers being right, so he was averaging the target numbers the whole time.

“In the pits, with the lack of pressure from other cars, we wanted some insurance in case our numbers were wrong, but he was confident those numbers were right.

“The accuracy we run our numbers to makes it a highly complex equation to allow the drivers maximum speed. Unfortunately this was the worst time for his faith in us to be let down.

“Either way, our numbers should have been right, first and foremost, and we’ve got to investigate why.

“Then he should have taken the opportunity for the insurance and driven to what we were telling him later, but he didn’t.”

Dutton says that Red Bull is ready to move on with its season after a rough Bathurst weekend that had also seen the squad forced to rebuild both cars after pre-race crashes.

“Everyone’s feeling very tired, but positive to move on,” he said.

“Everyone’s looking forward to the Gold Coast, but no one’s had a break since Bathurst.

“Bathurst was huge and then combine that with an average of three or four hours sleep a night every night of that week, that makes it even tougher.

“Combine that with the disappointment of the last lap on Sunday and it all takes a physical and emotional toll on everyone because every single person invests so much of their energy into what we do.

“Everyone is definitely burning the candles at both ends now to try and ensure that Gold Coast is a much neater and cleaner weekend with smooth running.

“If we roll out with fast cars, everyone’s smiling even if you’re doing repairs.”

A fifth place saw Whincup extend his championship lead to 297 points over Mark Winterbottom, who demoted 10th-place finishing Craig Lowndes to third.