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Triple Eight say Scott McLaughlin ”intentionally” hit Shane van Gisbergen

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Triple Eight Race Engineering team manager Mark Dutton has labeled the incident between Shane van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin as intentional by the DJR Team Penske driver.

“You can see that McLaughlin has unloaded him, which was bad enough, but then to come in with the second hit, which was quite big, shows that he actually intentionally spun the car,” said Dutton to Supercars.com.

“It’s not careless driving, it’s not a slip of this, it’s not that he braked too deep, it’s nothing like that, he intentionally took out the car that passed him.”

The incident dropped van Gisbergen to finish 15th while McLaughlin received a 15-second penalty, dropping him to tenth, not enough of a penalty, according to Dutton.

“What’s it saying to the rest of the drivers that you can take out someone that passes you and get 15 seconds?” said Dutton.

“That’s their job to interpret that, but I think it’s a light penalty. I don’t understand why it’s not a drive-through.

McLaughlin described the incident as ”bad judgement” on his part.

“I’ve got to look at the rules and stuff because I felt like Shane pulled out a bit early. What happened on the front-straight was history, that peeved me off a little bit and then I just made a bad judgement into turn 2,” said McLaughlin.

“I copped the penalty, my fault… at the end of the day you do the crime, you do the time.”