Pye: “I let go of the wheel and copped it sweet”

The DJR Team Penske was starting his final run of the session when he had he suspects is a rear brake failure as he went to slow for Turn 3 at the end of the longest straight on the circuit.

He was then a passenger in the DJRTP Ford as he flew head-on into the tyre barrier.

“It went straight straight on. I braced, let go of the wheel, and copped it sweet,” he explained.

“I pressed the brake pedal into [Turn] 3. For a millisecond it felt okay, and then it went to the floor. I came back and went for a second go and I think I only had front brake, so it just locked both fronts.

“The good thing there is that there is at least a big amount of tyres to run in to.

“Track safety there is really good. Going in, you think the worse but I could see the tyres. Fortunately it actually lifted the car up as well, so the force wasn’t too bad. Track safety there was really good. The tyres went flying, I hope nobody got hit.

“It’s a real shame for the boys, it makes there day a lot harder. And it’s not the time when I need to be out of the car, I want to be in there doing the best job that I can.”

Rear rotors changed before crash

While not wanting to speculate on the cause of the failure before the team has done a detailed analysis of what happened, Pye did confirm that the team had completed a rear rotor change right before he began the final run.

“You don’t like to guess, we’ll get it back and do a diagnosis on it and see what happened,” he said. “We just had a rear rotor vibration, so we came in and just changed the rotors. That was all.

“The car looks pretty bad. It’s juts disappointing. Hopefully we can get it back out. It really felt like we were on to possible a win this weekend. Hopefully it’s not as bad as it looks.”

As case of Déjà vu

It’s not Pye’s first major crash in a Supercar; at Symmons Plains in 2013 he was involved in a frightening crash when he had a brake failure on his LD Motorsport Commodore.

He also suffered cracked ribs when he hit the wall during the Bathurst 1000 last year thanks to a suspension failure.

“You think that a brake failure or throttle jam is once in a lifetime, but two in a few years is not a nice feeling,” he said.

“Tassie wasn’t the biggest hit I’ve had anyway; Bathurst was the biggest one by about 20-something G. I think that that one is still big, still an ugly crash. I’m disappointed for everyone involved.”