JAXON Evans has revealed that contact with Thomas Randle was behind his damaging swipe of the Albert Park fence in yesterday’s action-packed Supercars opener.
Television cameras picked up the end of the incident whereby Evans slapped the wall coming onto the pit straight, but missed the Randle clash which proved the catalyst.
“I’m still a little bit unsure because I have only seen what I felt from the driver’s seat,” the #12 SCT Camaro driver told V8 Sleuth post-race.
“I saw he kind of swung out for a move at the last corner and was so far out of vision that I didn’t actually think he was going for it at that stage, I thought it was maybe a little bit too desperate for Lap 2, especially considering he ran off the track the lap before and rejoined pretty unsafely down at Turn 3.
“We ended up making contact and it put me in the wall.”
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Randle escaped punishment for the matter, which was not referred to the stewards on the basis that “the available broadcast footage demonstrated that Car 55 (Randle) was not to blame for the incident”.
In any case, Evans was left to limp home with visible rear damage.
“It was a pretty big hit, obviously the contact to spin me but then it’s a pretty close tyre wall there,” he said.
“Basically from there I just had to circulate to stay on track and try to get some points or pick up the pieces if other people went off.
“Not ideal, and not a very good race to learn from going forward into the weekend.”
There was otherwise some glimpses of progress for the Porsche pro turned Supercars rookie, who was fifth in Practice 1 and outqualified teammates Andre Heimgartner and Macauley Jones for Race 2 of the weekend, which will unfold today at 2:55pm AEDT.
“I’m still trying to get my head around the way the cars work and what they need to go fast, and that’s also a working relationship with my engineer and sort of feeding each other information to try to finetune for what we want from the car,” said Evans.
“We can confidently say things are going in the right direction.”
