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While Jack Perkins gave the fledgling squad its second-ever race win via the Super2 Series, a major repair effort was underway to get the #3 CoolDrive Mustang on the grid for the Sandown 500.
Rookie Aaron Love had earlier come unstuck during a wet qualifying session, losing control through the high-speed curves at the end of the back straight and making heavy contact with the outside wall.
The car is undergoing an engine change as part of the repair, which the team hopes will be complete by 10pm.
“The chassis looks fine, the front clip looks fine, that’s what took most of the impact,” Love explained to Speedcafe on Saturday evening. “At this stage, we’re not taking clips off or anything like that.
“We won’t get a 100 percent answer on that until the boys can put the engine in and put it on the flat patch and see where it’s at, but from what we can see it shouldn’t be too bad.”
Love spins and brings out the red flag!
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— Supercars (@supercars) September 14, 2024
BRT had to remove the engine from the crashed car in order to repair a crack on the front clip and has opted to replace it with the spare.
“Really we’re only changing the engine because, just after the throttle body at the start of the engine, the intake manifold has snapped off, which you can replace quite easily, but you just don’t know what’s gone into the engine before the engine has been turned off,” Love said.
“When that all happened it instantly goes to full throttle and it basically is as wide-open throttle as you’re going to get with no throttle body on it.
“The engine could be perfectly fine with a replacement throttle body, but it’s not a risk we want to take, especially when we’ve got the opportunity to throw in a fresh engine and it’s going to be safe.”
The crash was the result of Love running too hot into the high-speed Turn 6.
“We were offset to everyone in terms of where we were to the tyre phasing. Our lap four was everyone else’s lap three,” he said.
“We were bringing it in, it felt quite good, progressively tried to go faster and faster as you do in qualifying and then went into Turn 6, tried to make up a bit of time through there and just ran a little bit wide, which is nothing out of the ordinary.
“I tried to keep it in tight within track limits to at least get a lap in but unfortunately couldn’t bring it back in time and had to make the cut-through, but didn’t commit enough to cutting the Turn 7 kerb and just got the left-rears over the painted blue and white kerb.
“In the wet, the kerbs are obviously quite slippery and that’s what hurt us. I ended up going down the hill and made the wall unfortunately.”
The incident is the latest in a torrid rookie season for the Super2 graduate, who had hoped to build on promising qualifying speed shown at Symmons Plains last month.
Asked if it’s hard to pick himself up from the incident, Love said: “I’ve had moments where it has been, yes.
“It’s frustrating because I feel we would have been on for quite a good result, coming off the back of Tasmania being a bit faster in qualifying and I feel like we’ve evolved that this weekend.”
Love spent the afternoon assisting with the repair effort, although downplayed the importance of his involvement.
“I’m just helping out where I can,” he said. “I leave the more important bits to the others, but I just want to help out where I can. Taking any workload I can off the boys is the aim.”
