Triple Eight takes blame for tyre failures

All three Triple Eight cars avoided failures during yesterday’s chaotic affair, yet the tables turned today when, amid a day of vastly improved rubber reliability, the team’s three drivers all had dramas.

The issues effectively cost Triple Eight any chance of victory, while Prodrive Racing Australia – a team that suffered five separate failures yesterday – managed to set its cars up to allow Chaz Mostert and Mark Winterbottom to complete a 27-lap stint on a single set to take a 1-2.

According to Dutton, his team wasn’t anticipating the stints to be so long, and was caught short in terms of an aggressive strategy. That problem was then compounded, he says, by poor communication and instruction to the drivers.

“The Lap 1 safety car meant we had a set-up that was too aggressive, and we didn’t respond to manage that as well as we could have,” said Dutton.

“We were victims of our own success, because we nailed that yesterday. It meant we didn’t have to be over conservative today – which, when the safety car came out, we weren’t on the right side for those specific conditions.

“Looking back, we should have been better with our communication to the driver. It’s getting the feedback off them, because there’s also so much in how you drive the car. If you go out and slide the car, the tyre is going to overheat and [the failure] is going to happen quicker.

“We needed to do a better job collectively, and I’ll put my hand up, to communicate with the drivers. Are you sliding doing that pace? No? Cool, that pace is good. 'Yes I am' – back it off. You want to go quicker - too bad, back it off to that safe, non-sliding pace.

“That’s what we should have reacted to and done better when we were forced into doing stints we didn’t want to do.

“Our [failures] were self-inflicted. We could have done a better job. With the high tyre pressures the car felt really bad out there, but the problem is they were still going fairly quick.

"Just before Jamie’s tyre blew he was, I think, the fastest car on track. And we didn’t have the fastest cars on pure performance, so therefore to go that pace he was pushing.

“We should have worked better than that. If we’re going that fast, we’re pushing harder than everyone else. I should have done a better job with the engineers to then work with the drivers and say they need to back it off a little more.”