Van Gisbergen 'gutted' after bizarre pitlane crash
Shane van Gisbergen says he's gutted to come away from today's race in New Zealand with so few points, with a bizarre pitlane crash leaving him with little more than mathematical title hopes.
Shane van Gisbergen, Triple Eight Race Engineering Holden
Edge Photographics
The Kiwi kept his slim chances of defending his 2016 Supercars crown alive with an impressive win on home soil yesterday, but is now all but out of the running thanks to a horror Sunday at Pukekohe.
The issue was a bizarre error on Lap 16, the Red Bull Holden clattering into the back of Tim Slade's BJR Commodore as the pair came into pitlane.
The resulting repair took 14 laps to fix, van Gisbergen ultimately classified 24th.
He's now 276 points behind teammate Jamie Whincup with just 300 on offer at the season finale in Newcastle later this month.
"I made a mistake coming into pitlane behind Tim, he was quite cautious, which he's allowed to be, and I misjudged it," he said.
"It would've been fine if he wasn't there, but he just over-slowed and I couldn't stop in time and ran up the back of him causing a lot of damage."
The poor result also gives DJR Team Penske the upper hand in the team's championship, with a second and fifth for Scott McLaughlin and Fabian Coulthard putting the squad 105 points clear of Triple Eight.
"I am gutted for us to lose so many points for our team's championship which is so important to us. Pitlane priority is what we're aiming for and to not score as many points as I could for the team, which was my job for the weekend, is pretty disappointing.
"The team were awesome though, to fix the car like that in the amount of time we needed to be classified. The car was pretty mangled so the amount of work they did in the short time they had was pretty great.
"Now we've go to do what we can to help Jamie win the championship, but also our team's championship is the priority – to get in front of the [DJR] guys we really have to put two cars out the front of both races and score some good points."
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