Murphy/Stanaway facing Bathurst heartbreak

Erebus Motorsport was set to field a third Boost Mobile-backed Holden for Kiwis Murphy and Stanaway at the Great Race next month.

However that plan may have been harpooned by Brown's monster crash in the second race at Pukekohe today.

The high-speed impact has left Brown's regular chassis badly damaged – perhaps to a terminal extent.

Trying to repair the car will be further complicated by both the air travel required to return to Australia and he fact the Erebus chassis jig is currently being used to build its Gen3 cars.

Should the car not be able to be repaired, Brown and Jack Perkins will shift into the spare car earmarked for Murphy and Stanaway.

Murphy and Stanaway would then miss the Bathurst 1000, with Erebus CEO Barry Ryan telling media he has already rejected offers from other teams to borrow a chassis.

When asked if he thought Brown's car could be repaired, Ryan said: “First thought is no, but we’re never going to give up.

"We’ve already had offers to borrow cars and stuff but this is an Erebus project: we’re not putting Murph and Richie in some other car that we have sort of bashed together as a half-arsed car.

"Unless we can do it probably, we’re not doing it. Unfortunately, we have got a championship with two drivers, so the wildcard will miss out if someone needs to miss out.

"The problem is, we have got our Gen3 chassis being built at the moment on the jig. The timeline is so tight on them that we can’t take them off and put a car on to try to fix it and there’s no way this is going to be fixed at the workshop without a jig.

"I don’t want to say no yet, I never say no, but we’ll wait and see. We have got to get it back to the shop and have a look properly.”

Ryan also ruled out using another team's chassis jig to repair Brown's car.

“Our jig is a jig of its own," he said. "It’s so expensive to fix these things. We’ll just wait and see. I can’t say yes, I can’t say no at the moment.”

Expanding on the impact of the Gen3 build, Ryan said the timeline is so tight that even taking the new-spec cars off the jig for a single day may not be possible.

“Our timeline is that short on Gen3 as it is," said Ryan.

"Luckily our first Gen3 car is about to come off the jig but [fabricator] James [White] has actually just started this weekend building the second one.

"We just can’t afford to lose a day on that Gen3 project at the moment.

"It’s not just the chassis. The chassis we can finish in the next four weeks but our fabricators need to build suspension arms and brackets. They have got everything up until February. There’s not really a day spare on our timeline to build these things.”

The team does have one other car in its fleet, the famous 'Mercadore', which is a Mercedes fitted with Commodore bodywork and is usually run at ride days.

However he confirmed that car isn't fit for the Bathurst project and won't be considered.

“Like a Walkinshaw chassis, you could put it together and make it work but we’re not going there to half-arse the project. That’s just unfair on everyone.”

Should the third Erebus car not make the Bathurst 1000 grid the field will drop to 27 cars, the 25 regulars plus wildcards from Triple Eight and Matt Chahda Motorsport.