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Having won Race 17 a day earlier, the Matt Stone Racing driver went from hero to zero.
The team opted not to run a new set of tyres and hedged their bets on a 51.3600s being fast enough to go from Q1 into Q2.
Ultimately, it wasn’t enough as he plummeted from the pointy end of the pile to 24th.
“What have we done here?” Percat could be heard saying on the radio.
Speaking on Fox Sports’ coverage, Percat could only laugh at his predicament.
“Need to be on the track at the right time,” he said.
“Yeah. Very, very annoying. I think we had a car for pole too. We just didn’t run [new] tyres. We just ran some used tyres and hoped to sneak through on that, so that’s it.”
Percat roaded a set of tyres in the dying moments of the first qualifying leg.
“We had done our lap on our used tyre. We were fourth or fifth,” said Percat.
“Yeah, the timing was bad and then we didn’t have time to do anything so I just hoped to sneak through.”
An early shock exit for Saturday’s race winner 😱
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— Supercars (@supercars) August 18, 2024
Percat was joined by James Courtney, Macauley Jones, and Mark Winterbottom in the drop zone who held 20th, 21st, and 22nd respectively.
“In the end, we’re not fast enough,” said Courtney.
“It was quite promising this morning. We made a little bit of a change and just pushed ourselves out of the window.
“Pretty disappointing. These things are so fine with the adjustment. We only did one hole of rear roll centre and it’s dramatically changed the car.”
Race 18 of the Supercars season at the Tasmania SuperSprint is scheduled for 3:05pm AEST.
