AIM Motorsport hopes to determine an answer on what exactly cost it and Zane Morse a maiden Super2 race win at Bathurst.
Morse was in the box seat to win Race 2 at Mount Panorama earlier this month, given he was tucked in behind on-the-road leader Zak Best who had a five-second penalty hanging over his head for a jump start.
However, on Lap 16 of 18, Morse slowed significantly, eventually trundling down pitlane to retire from the race.
That left Kai Allen to pick up the scraps, closing to within 30 points of Best in the title race ahead of the Adelaide decider.
But for Morse, a special triumph at the Mountain went begging.
“I always say the Mountain picks its winner and that’s clearly what happened… it was a tough pill to swallow,” AIM Motorsport boss Andre Morse told V8 Sleuth.
The privateer team is due to pull apart the pink Mustang – formerly raced by Tickford star Cam Waters in the main game – next week for an autopsy.
“We still don’t know what’s happened, because according to everything that the engineer’s put down, we still should have had fuel,” said Morse Sr.
“So he reckons it has done a fuel lift pump, but until we actually pull the fuel tank out, we won’t know, and that’s not happening until next week.
“So we still at this stage think it is a fuel lift pump problem but we don’t know for sure.”
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The squad, which has also been fielding a Super3 car for Ryan Gilroy, plans to use the adversity to galvanise themselves.
“If anything, it just makes us hungrier,” said Morse Sr.
“Now we have got the right car, we know that Zane should run at the front.
“We are working hard on his qualifying which in the second race he proved, when you qualify in the front two rows you can run up the front. We have always known the speed is there, it’s just being able to put the car in that position.
“As for what happened… we have got a saying in our team, ‘don’t be bitter, be better’, and that’s how we work.
“No one came in screaming going, ‘you didn’t put the right amount of fuel in and it’s this person’s fault!’
“We don’t do that, we work as a team and we all just got on with the job of packing up and we had a couple of drinks later to commiserate and we just moved forward from that.”
Three successive DNFs have dropped Morse from sixth to 15th in the Super2 standings.
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