4am finish for Whincup Holden repair

Jamie Whincup’s Holden Commodore will return to the track for this morning’s final Supercars practice at the Adelaide 500 after overnight repairs that finished at 4am.

The brand-new Red Bull ZB was heavily damaged in a 52G Turn 8 qualifying crash on Friday afternoon, Whincup’s first big hit at the notorious corner.

Team manager Mark Dutton ranks the repair effort as the second biggest the team has undertaken behind its rescue of Craig Lowndes’ car at Pukekohe in 2015.

“We left the track about 4:15am,” he said.

“We managed to send a lot of people home around midnight to 1am, then there was just the crew and a few extras here until 4:15am. 

“We just dropped it on the patch and it was amazingly good. The repairs were fantastic.

“You never expect it to be that good, even when you're just replacing bits for normal service without a shunt it's hard to be that close. Full credit to everyone there.

“We dropped it on and the toes were adjustable half-a-mill to a mill, so next to nothing. The corner weights were within half-a-turn to being bang on.

“Even when you just change a damper set, the corner weights need a bit of a tweak, so that's within a tolerance of the car being where it was before it hit the wall. 

“It's a really good repair, which is why we were there until 4am. We took our time, as painful as it was, to make sure it was as perfect as we could get it.

“Apart from where it needs a bit of paint where it's been welded, if you stuck your head under there you wouldn't be able to tell where it's been repaired.”

. It's all the chassis spares that we had a good chunk of. When you do a full car rebuild, that's decent.

“But we're still fine, we carry three sets to rebuild a car several times let alone be able to supply customers with chassis parts, not just ZB parts.”