Team 18’s Bathurst-losing pit stop error is “unforgivable”, according to Supercars legend Mark Skaife, as the Chevrolet squad picks up the pieces from its Mount Panorama heartbreak.
Anton de Pasquale led the final stages of the weekend’s Bathurst 1000 and seemed on track for victory until he was accidentally underfuelled at his final pit stop. Despite heavy fuel saving and a late safety car, he ran dry on the final lap, coughing up the lead to Brodie Kostecki.
A post-race inquiry concluded that Team 18’s strategy software had incorrectly calculated the fuel required to make it to the finish. The General Motors homologation squad said it was a team responsibility but that no individual person was to blame.
The team had deliberately underfuelled the car at the penultimate pit stop in a successful bid to hold track position in the lead over Will Brown, but the subsequent error was all the more galling for De Pasquale having built a sufficiently comfortable lead in that stint to have taken on more fuel for the finish.
Reports suggest as little as two or three more seconds in pit lane would have been enough to make it to the finish.
But Skaife said the fine margins didn’t count as mitigating circumstances when the stakes were so high.
“It’s horrible, but it’s unforgivable,” he told MotorRacing 360 on Fox Sports.
“It’s Australia’s biggest car race. At your last stop, you have to put up the right amount of fuel in — that’s just fundamental — and you have to make it so that you can sprint to the end.
“Play it out. If the safety car doesn’t come out, they stop earlier because he’s going at full race pace.
“The safety car almost rescued them.
“But the reality is, it is Australia’s biggest car race, and everyone with every bit of brain power in that organisation needed to be part of the last stop to work out not just with software and stuff but the actual calculation.”
De Pasquale out of fuel on FINAL lap | 00:53
Skaife, a six-time Bathurst winner, said the team should have gone “back to fundamentals” for the race-deciding pit stop.
“Yes, there is a software number that updates after every lap that they’ll have a number to get home by,” he said. “Firstly, that needs to have flexibility. Obviously it didn’t have that.
“The second part is that you go and work it out just with a plan-out calculation of what you need to finish the race.
“There’s the maths — there’s the simple calculation over here of what you think you need to get to the end — and then there’s predictive software that gives you a guide.
“In the middle of all that, neither of those took place.
“This is not personal anyway. There’s no way that anyone in that place would ever miscalculate or do anything like that. It’s heartbreaking.
“I mostly feel sorry for Anton de Pasquale and Lee Holdsworth, who drove so well all day and probably should have won that race.
“The reality is there’s a massive mistake at the end, and they didn’t.”
The fact that others appeared to twig to the possibility of car 18 being too light on fuel before the team itself realised has become a storyline in the aftermath.
The possibility of having had a chance to save the race with earlier action will have made the eventual realisation only more painful.
“For them not to have been able to fuel save earlier and then for them to have corrective surgery as a consequence of that, that’s what hurts you in the end,” Skaife said.
“I think what they’ve done, to internally review it properly, is clearly what you’ve got to do. Everyone’s got to be really honest about how that is appraised and what they do moving forward with whatever software stuff they use and whatever calculation methodology they use.
“You’ve got to be really harsh on yourselves about not doing that again.
“But the second part of that then is to be able to regroup.
“You’ve got to learn now from losing and you’ve got to learn in a way that’s proactive to finish the rest of this championship off.
“I think their statement was pretty apt. I think the thing that you’ve got to do now is try to get them all together, put your arm around them, and press on with the last part of the year.”
Anton de Pasquale was one of just two Camaro drivers to qualify for the finals, finishing the regular season seventh.
The first round of the knockout campaign begins next weekend with the Gold Coast 500.
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