TRIPLE Eight team manager Mark Dutton admits to having some regret about volunteering to an in-event trial of a new Safety Car limiter being explored by Supercars.
Shane van Gisbergen lost 18 minutes in the half-hour opening practice session at the Darwin Triple Crown due to a glitch in the experimental system being run in the #97 Red Bull Ampol Camaro.
Supercars is investigating the use of a Safety Car limiter, similar but separate to the pitlane limiter, to ensure competitors slow to an appropriate speed (120km/h) more swiftly than currently seen.
“What we were trying to help Supercars with is looking towards the future with how we can improve the safety when there’s a car in a position you don’t want,” Dutton explained.
“Launching a Safety Car obviously takes time to slow the field so this was a systems check to a Safety Car sort of limiter.
“This wasn’t the refined version or anything, this was ‘okay, let’s have a button’ – you don’t use the pit limiter button that we use in pitlane so it’s a separate button to enact the Safety Car speed limiter.
“Unfortunately it cost us massively because it pretty much destroyed our session… we’ll work hard to make sure it doesn’t have a lingering knock-on effect for the rest of the weekend.
“The sessions are so short, the field is so tight as we’ve all seen that you can’t afford this to happen.
“Ultimately this comes back to a mistake on my part as team manager to not say ‘no, we’re not going to do this, let’s do this at a test day’.
“You try to be nice and do it for the category, like it’s a safety thing, it’s 100 percent non-performance what we were doing, but unfortunately it made us have no performance so it has been a really expensive lesson.”
Regardless, Dutton is supportive of the technology overall in making the category safer, even if he’s unsure exactly when it might be able to be properly introduced.
“You have got to refine it and make it work first because clearly a lot of smart people from Motec and Supercars and even our guys involved, everyone thought it was going to run okay there but it didn’t,” he said.
“You don’t want to put any dates on things right now. And in general you have got to be careful bringing things in mid-season.
“That said, if we can get it tuned up, then anything that improves the safety we should bring in as soon as possible, as soon as it’s reliable.
“We’re always pushing and hence why we were motivated to help with this, is because it’s about safety… we have been very fortunate not to see a massive incident with cars off and other cars going past very quickly.”
Van Gisbergen ended up 18th in Practice 1, while teammate Broc Feeney was fastest.
Second and final practice started a short time ago.
