BROC Feeney feels he was in a lose-lose situation regardless of what he chose to do once he was sent spinning at the first corner of Sunday’s Supercars race at Albert Park.
The now-former championship leader was tapped sideways in front of the field amid a chain reaction of contacts behind him.
Macauley Jones tagged Kai Allen – already battling with damage from an earlier tangle with Ryan Wood – which sent the Penrite Mustang into its Red Bull Ampol brethren.
From there, Feeney spun up the rear wheels to try and spin the car off the track, only to be hit two more times in impacts that left the #88 Ford badly damaged.
Feeney emerged unscathed from the multiple hits and watched replays after being assessed in the circuit medical centre.
“I just tried lighting it up to try get out of everyone’s way. Obviously it’s very hard to know what to do in that moment, but I was just trying to spin back out of the way and I think Cooper tagged me in the rear and then Zach in the front,” Feeney told V8 Sleuth.
“When I watch it back, I’m like ‘if I clamped it down, maybe I would have been better’ but in that situation, I feel like whatever you do is nearly going to be wrong.
“I just tried spinning it up to spin back out of the way. Ideally I was trying to get off the track, which I ended up a little bit further off, but some guys went through the grass and hit me.
“Sitting in the middle of the track with 15 cars coming at you is not that fun, so I just tried doing what I could to get out of the way.
“I would have been pretty lucky to survive that one I think.”
The crash ends a streak of consecutive finishes for Feeney that spans the entire Gen3 era, dating back to his similarly-bruising early exit from the Sunday race at the Gold Coast in 2022.
Pic: Supplied/Mark Horsburgh
Of the impact, Feeney said: “It was pretty decent.
“It’s just your head gets thrown around, I was spinning one way and then literally got hit spinning the other way.
“I had a couple of big impacts. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a crash. It’s only my second DNF and my first one was that one at Gold Coast which was decent.
“It’s been a while since I’ve had a hit, so I hope that’s my last one for a while.”
The driver was in better shape than the car, which sported severe damage on all four corners with the right-rear wheel ripped off entirely.
But, despite a quick turnaround for Queensland teams to get home and ship the cars to New Zealand, Feeney is hopeful his current car will make it onto the boat.
“They think it’s alright,” Feeney said. “My big worry is obviously we go to New Zealand in a few days.
“I want to keep my car, so the beauty of these ones with the clips, hopefully we can just do a rear clip and it will be all good to go.”
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