Jamie Whincup was left to rue a costly human error during a pit stop in Race 15 on what was ‘a day to forget’ for the six-time champion at the Coates Hire Ipswich Super Sprint.
The championship contender was dealt a blow before the start of the race when he was hit with a five-place grid penalty for contact with James Moffat in qualifying.
Demoted from ninth to 14th on the grid, Triple Eight opted for an aggressive pit strategy to lift Whincup through the field, but it quickly unravelled.
An issue with the air spike to jack up the car forced the team to employ a secondary rig.
Triple Eight team manager Mark Dutton confirmed to Speedcafe.com that the pit stop issue was down to a human error with the implementation of the air spike.
The drama put Whincup to the back of the pack where he managed to rise up to 20th at the chequered flag.
However, the result has seen the deficit to championship leader Scott McLaughlin, who won Race 15, expand to 111 points.
“I want to forget today,” said Whincup.
“Something happened in the pit stop, the spike didn’t go in, so that was pretty much the end of our day and didn’t have a huge amount of pace to come back through because we’d stopped so early, so one to forget.
“What could go wrong did go wrong today, I don’t know how to explain it, but we’ll regroup and come back tomorrow but we lost a lot of points today.
“We’ve ground it out for three months and got some good points but we pretty much blew it all today, so that’s the game, it’s a tough sport, tough gig.
“We knew that when we signed up for it many years ago, but we’ll fight back stronger tomorrow.”
The Supercars field will return for a 20 minute qualifying session on Sunday ahead of a 65 lap race at 1405 local time.
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