Pye opens up about infamous Gala scuffle

Pye and then-Tickford driver Kostecki were involved in a physical altercation at the end-of-season awards night in Adelaide.

The incident has often been linked to Kostecki losing his Tickford seat shortly afterwards despite being contracted for 2023.

Neither have spoken publicly about the matter until now, with Pye detailing his side of the story on his Apex Hunters United podcast.

According to Pye it was more of a wrestle than a fight – and the biggest casualty was an accidental black eye for his partner and ex-Erebus MD Shannen Kiely.

“Jake Kostecki and I, yes, we did get in a fight at the gala a few years ago,” said Pye.

“I’ve never talked about this. The [Daily] Telegraph got hold of it and they wanted to do a story on it. And at the time, I’m like, it’s a nothing story, really.

“While I was racing full time I wanted to keep it under wraps, but now who cares. So what happened was, I was actually chatting to Brodie Kostecki and Jake. I don’t know if he thought I was arguing with Brodie. But I wasn’t. I was just chatting to Brodie, and it ended up in a verbal disagreement.

“Anyway, he grabbed me and had me running backwards, like out of nowhere, taking tables down with us. I have flashbacks of that going, ‘fuck me, I’m running backwards here with someone hanging on to my collar, and I’m pulling tables and chairs back’.

“I ended up on my ass. There was not a punch thrown. It would have looked like two idiots stumbling backwards whilst cleaning out tables.

“Jake was on top of me, literally nothing happened. I think Barry Ryan pulled him off me.

“The next morning I woke up, and I heard Shannen in the bathroom call out that she had a black eye. I was like, ‘fuck, who’d you get in a fight with?’.

“And she said, ‘it was you, you idiot. You got in the fight’.

“I didn’t remember anything. And no joke, her eye was black. As it was happening, Jake got pulled off [and] tried to shake off whoever was pulling him off me, and she’s copped a drive by. By accident.”

Pye is convinced the story was then leaked to mainstream media by Supercars.

“I did not remember it happening, and then it was actually someone from Supercars that leaked the story,” he claimed.

“That’s what frustrated Jake and I the most, because we spoke the next day, and we’re like, ‘fucking hell, I don’t even remember…’.

“At the end of the day, there were no punches thrown. We both were like, ‘should we just go for breakfast and post a photo of breakfast?’ Because we did not care, at all, about it.

“And even Shannen was like, ‘you guys are idiots’. She just laughed.

“But the way it got out, it was actually someone from Supercars had a phone call from a journalist, and they fucking told them what happened, but it got blown out of proportion because the person that told the story, I found out wasn’t in the room.

“So when Jake and I were like, ‘it says there’s a fight’, and he was like, ‘I’m pretty sure I tackled you, but I don’t remember like it breaking into fisticuffs, we weren’t punching on’.

“That was what happened at Gala.”