Screen of scream as dream ends
THE HEARTBREAK
SCOTT McLaughlin is watching a computer screen inside the DJR Team Penske garage. Already 74 laps are done. Nine more and this Bathurst 1000 favourite is slated to regain the wheel from co-driver Alex Premat.
But then – well, McLaughlin notices the graph showing car speed. Specifically, how it’s dropping. Fast. Yet still he hopes. “Thinking maybe,” he says later, “that it’s only something little.”
And why not? Still only 24, McLaughlin is this particular Sunday morning looking to become a mountain story to rival Sound of Music.
Buoyed, first, by that Friday qualifying session where this rising racer set the fastest Supercars lap ever around Mount Panorama. Then set it again. On Saturday, rewriting that Lap of the Gods for a third time when out last in the Top 10 Shootout.
And again here in his garage, this is a story about speed. The decreasing variety.
And so McLaughlin watches the screen. Then watches race engineer Ludo Lacroix as he starts pointing frantically.
“At which point,’’ McLaughlin concedes, “we were stuffed.”
Another year, another Sunday of mountain madness. Like heavy rain. A kangaroo. Somehow even a rock appearing, almost impossibly, on a track that alternated between slippery, foggy, oily, dark, even all of the above.
But still, the greatest heartbreak belongs to McLaughlin.
And that car which simply stopped up near The Cutting.
“So I feel pretty weird at the moment,” McLaughlin says about 40 minutes later.
“What’s happened, it still hasn’t sunk in.
“But it sucks. It’s out of our control what happened.”
Quizzed on what went wrong, McLaughlin jokingly throws Premat under the bus.
“Everything was fine for me,’’ he says, smiling. “I did the old Brocky, got it in here and everything was fine. “So Alex broke it.” But really? “The engine just let go,’’ he says. “Around lap 50 it dropped a cylinder. Or dropped something. It wasn’t running on everything and progressively got worse.
“I was getting back in on lap 83, too. But obviously I didn’t get there . . . it sucks.”
And those last two words, McLaughlin repeats maybe five or six times. Fair enough, too. Apart from cruelling his Bathurst 1000 hopes, the bung Falcon has also stolen his lead in the Supercars championship.
In one moment, dropping from first to third on 2334 points.
Behind new leader Fabian Coulthard (2431), who finished third around Mount Panorama, and Jamie Whincup (2340), who limped home in 20th.
“This is a massive hit on my championship, definitely,’’ McLaughlin says.
“We had a really good chance today and it sucks to have that taken out of your hands.”
But as for that lack of control making things easier to accept? “It’s never easier,’’ he says. “The Bathurst 1000, you want to win it.
“And given we’ve shown a lot of promise today, I’m sure we will come back and win.
“But yeah, this sucks.”