After a rapid start to the 2024 Supercars season, Triple Eight endured its first tough weekend of the campaign on the Reid Park circuit, which is traditionally a happy hunting ground.
Qualifying pace was the key issue, with Broc Feeney sneaking into back half of the top 10 each day, while series leader Will Brown managed just 13th on the grid on Saturday and 17th on the Sunday.
Brown was able to recover to third in Saturday’s race, but finished last on Sunday after a lap 1 crash that very nearly took him out of the race entirely.
While the sudden dip in form for T8 was somewhat unexpected, Dutton isn’t predicting any issues with Brown or the team as a whole recovering ahead of the Sydney SuperNight next week.
“To be honest, I don’t think there’ll be a big rebuilding phase,” he told Speedcafe.
“Will is a seasoned campaigner, so he’ll take it in his stride. And all our crew are the same.
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“Yes, we know how to win, but we also know, when we don’t win, how to keep your head up and keep moving forward.
“It’s obviously consistency across the year that wins championships. So no, there’s no bottom lips dropped, nothing like that happening. Everyone’s head is up.
“And while we will analyse, and we’re not happy with the performance, ultimately, there’s still some good takeouts. And there’s a lot of learnings on what we could have done better to dig into.”
During the Townsville weekend, T8 managing director Jamie Whincup indicated that the particular batch of Dunlop soft compound tyres in use was proving problematic for the team.
However the event allocation tyres, which were used by all teams, came from the same batch that was used for the Albert Park round back in March, where T8 qualified relatively strongly (including a race 1 pole for Feeney).
According to Dutton, the real disappointment from Townsville was that T8 wasn’t able to turn its qualifying speed around between the Saturday and Sunday sessions.
“As a team you taken those days in your stride, but you don’t like them,” he said.
“Really, it comes back to our qualifying. Broc and [race engineer] Marty [Short] did a good job on the #88 to maximise not a great car to be in the [top] 10 both times and to do decently.
“But the cars haven’t been hooked up in quali. And the disappointing thing, that we reflect on as a team, is that we weren’t able to tune them that far forward from Saturday to Sunday.
“Everyone worked hard overnight, but you don’t always get it right.”
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