Scott Pye has labelled a heavily shortened Supercars race at the Formula 1 Rolex Australian Grand Prix as “a total lottery”.
Race 4 of the Repco Supercars Championship at Albert Park immediately followed Qualifying for the FIA Formula 3 Championship, a session which was littered with incidents.
As such, pit exit opening was delayed by about 10 minutes, the equivalent of around five laps, meaning a time-certain finish was always on the cards.
That only became more likely when the Safety Car was called on Lap 1, and the race would end under a second Safety Car period after a total of just eight racing laps of a scheduled 15, or 42km out of a scheduled 79.
Even then, only around five laps were run under green flag conditions, with the first Safety Car called on Lap 1, the restart coming at the start of Lap 4, then another Safety Car called on Lap 7.
“We didn’t really do a race,” declared Pye.
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“Unfortunately, the categories before us had red flags and it pushed our session back and they just shortened the race to the point where it was a total lottery.”
Making matters worse for the Team 18 driver, who had qualified 14th, he started on the hard compound of tyre.
For the second day in a row, light rain on the formation lap saw the circuit declared wet, only for the race to essentially be dry throughout.
It gave those who started on super softs the option of staying on the same compound throughout and just changing rear tyres, a play which was also available to Pye but would not have been advantageous on the harder rubber.
“Frustrating day for us,” he added, having finished 20th.
“Unfortunately, we started hard, so we had to do a four-tyre stop when others only had to do two.
“If you started on the soft tyre, they declared it wet when it didn’t rain again, so you only had to change two tyres.
“We want to put on a better show than that. Hopefully we get a bit little bit lucky with the times across the weekend and we can get full races in.”
Qualifying for Race 5 and Qualifying for Race 6 start tomorrow from 09:05 local time/AEDT, followed by Race 5 itself, scheduled for 13 laps, from 17:30.
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