The Grove team were largely the squad to beat at the Darwin Triple Crown and snatched the lead in the teams’ championship from Triple Eight.
However, it won just one of the three races, courtesy of Kai Allen on Saturday, with slow stops delaying Payne on both Friday and Sunday.
Sunday’s stung the most as the momentary bobble cost Payne track position to Cam Waters and allowed Anton De Pasquale to grab a lead he would never relinquish.
“It was just human error,” said Grove of the Sunday slip-up.
“We just didn’t quite get the wheel on cleanly and it just compounded from there and unfortunately we gave up a race win.
“It’s something we’ll take pretty seriously and we’ll take back to the factory and work on.
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“It’s happened a few times this year and it’s cost us a race win every time it’s happened.”
Payne finished third, fourth and second across the three races to close Broc Feeney’s points lead to just 15, labelling the weekend “bittersweet”.
“I was a little bit disappointed we didn’t get the win today,” he said.
“I felt like the first stint, we executed that really well, and then it was kind of a bit tough from there following the guys and trying to catch back up to Anton.
“Unfortunately we just didn’t quite have enough for him at the end sitting in the hot air, just with the way the tyre works.
“[It’s] a little bit bittersweet but still really good points for the team.”
Payne had also lost a potential win at Ruapuna when a wheel came off following a pit stop, which also netted a teams’ championship points penalty.
“I think Matt was very supportive in his comments of today, but he has every right to be frustrated with the result as we all are,” Grove added.
“We were not good enough today. It’s not acceptable and we’ll work hard to fix it. We know what our issues are.
“We’ve got very fast cars, which is cool, but we’re getting a lot of things wrong at the same time with crew mistakes, driver mistakes and we’re letting other people have results that we should be having.
“We need to fix that and it’s up to us to turn it around.”
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