Kai Allen’s momentum from a career first win at Ruapuna hit a wall in Tasmania on Saturday, when the 20-year-old came unstuck at the final corner in greasy qualifying conditions and left Grove Racing with a damaged car and a race against time.
Allen finished 17th in Q1 and only managed the 22nd fastest time for the opening race of the weekend after sliding wide on the exit of the left-hand sweeper and into the outside concrete wall. Grove Racing then had a little over 90 minutes to repair the #26 Mustang before Race 1, with Allen saying the right-rear was heavily damaged, the wing had come off and the rear took most of the hit.
“It’s a bit unfortunate. I’m gutted for the team,” Allen said. “Just struggling out there a little bit with all round grip and I felt like that last lap was half decent.” He said he got “a little bit sideways” in conditions made difficult by water on the track, and added: “I lost the rear and then once you’re on the grass, you’re just a passenger from there.”
The crash came at the end of Q1, at the point where a promising lap can still reshape a weekend. Allen had arrived in Tasmania on the back of the biggest result of his young career, but the greasy surface erased that confidence in an instant and turned attention straight to repairs.
“Sorry to all the guys and girls at Penrite Racing. I’m gutted for them, we’ve just got a bit of work to do,” he said. On the damage, Allen added: “It looks OK. Obviously the right-rear is very damaged,” before noting that the impact “got the rear first and swung the front around.” He said the wing had come off and that he was not sure how much damage had been done to the front.
For Grove Racing, the immediate challenge was not the qualifying sheet but the workshop clock. The team had little more than an hour and a half to get the Mustang back together before Race 1, and the scale of the rear-end damage made the turnaround a test of pace as much as patience. For Allen, the job became simpler: reset quickly, trust the repairs and try to salvage the rest of the weekend after a day that went from breakthrough to setback in a handful of corners.
