Tander frustrated after Courtney contact
It was a frustrating end to race two for Garth Tander today after being taken out by his teammate James Courtney at the NP300 Navara Winton SuperSprint. But the Holden Racing Team star is looking to tomorrow, hopeful changes to his Commodore pay off in the doubles points 200km race.
Tander and James Courtney both qualified back in the teens for today's two races at the Victorian circuit, and the situation immediately went from bad to worse on the first lap, whenCourtney made contact with car #2.
The accident also swept up stablemate Lee Holdsworth - whose car is believed to have the most damage, both cosmetic and to the suspension - and Courtney was promptly handed a drive through penalty before limping home in 23rd position.
Tander was understandably disappointed post-race after the teammates clashed on-track.
"To be honest I haven't seen any video yet and I don't know what happened," Tander told v8supercars.com.au.
"All I know is I got whacked in the rear and turned around.
"By the time I got out of the car and started watching the race I could see that another car painted very similar to mine had damage on the front.
"There was contact between the cars and I got turned around, and then when I got spun around I think Lee and Moff [James Moffat] got tangled in it as well.
"It's torn all the radiator out of my car and I lost water pressure and oil pressure, had to turn the engine off. We were done for the race anyway.
"It's done a lot of damage to Lee's car and taken Lee out the race as well - so not a great result at all really."
Tension is always high in the garage when teammates tangle on the track.
"It's not difficult for me - I didn't do anything wrong," Tander said wryly.
"It's just frustrating and disappointing for everyone in the team and all our supporters that something like that happens in racing.
"But it's happened before and it'll happen again and at some point. The most important thing is that we make the cars fast for tomorrow and when you're closer to the front hopefully stupid things like that don't happen."
The team had made changes to the Commodore for the second race, but didn't get a chance to assess whether there was any improvement - Tander finished 16th in the first.
"We had something in the car that was a lot different to the first race in that race, but obviously we didn't get a chance to test it.," he said.
"So now we're a bit blind going in to tomorrow because we didn't get to test what we wanted to test.
"I'm pretty confident we did make the car better - but we'll have to check tomorrow in practice because we didn't get a read on it in that second run."
Tander currently sits eighth in the Championship after a positive start to the season that saw him on the podium at the season opening Clipsal 500, one of four top five finishes this year.
Ford's Mark Winterbottom won the race ahead of Nissan's Rick Kelly.
