The Blanchard Racing Team driver said his foot went to the floor when he tried to brake approaching Turn 2.
He tried to arrest the speed of his Ford Mustang before it spun backwards into the tyre barrier.
The car suffered significant damage, leaving the team with a sizeable repair.
Love said he did not expect the team to repair the car to conduct further testing today.
Asked whether it was driver error or a car issue, Love replied: “My foot went to the floor, so that kind of answers your question.
“We’ll have to see what actually went wrong in the car. I know I pushed the correct pedal, so we’ll see what actually happened.”
Secure your spot today.
To that point, Love had been 18th quickest and had cut 40 laps.
By the end of the morning session, he was 1.903s in arrears of the chart-topping 1:30.535s by Matt Stone Racing’s Nick Percat in the #10 Chevrolet Camaro.
“I’m fine, luckily the HANS and seatbelts and everything did their job, which is nice,” said Love.
“Hopefully I don’t have to test that again. We had just been cycling through our plan for the day, making some changes, it was going quite well.
“We started to get a good understanding of what did what and making some good progress, but just made a change to the car and then rolled out, went into Turn 2, and the car didn’t really want to slow down too well at all.
“Very lucky that nothing else went wrong. Tried to go down a couple of gears to try and wash off any speed I could but ended up going backwards into the wall.
“Other than that, I’m fine. We’ve got a fair bit of work to see what went wrong to start with then try and rebuild for Friday.”
When pressed further on the state of his Ford Mustang, the 22-year-old downplayed the chance of a Wednesday return.
“Wait and see, to be honest. It was pretty big,” he said.
“There’s probably no hope of getting back out today, to be honest. It is a big shame.
“The boys and girls have worked really hard over the course of the summer to rebuild and have a reset and get a good understanding of what fundamentally we were doing wrong and why we never really made much progression throughout [last] year to try and reset for this year to make sure that we did get that progression – not only through the year but as the weekend progressed.
“So far, today, it had been going along the lines of that. Still early hours, but yeah, it’s a big shame that we’ve got deal with this.”
Discussion about this post