“I MIGHT as well sell my wet tyres. Doesn’t look like I’ll be allowed to use them.”

A bemused Porsche driver was overheard uttering such sentiments on Saturday afternoon at Mount Panorama after the second of the Carrera Cup races was abandoned before a lap had been completed.

Rain had begun to fall an hour earlier during the Dunlop Series race and continued sporadically through the V8 Utes race that followed.

But it worse as the Porsches hit the track and race one runner-up Matt Campbell spun during the warm-up lap. That led to  an initial decision to start the race behind the safety car.

The direction was then given for all cars to pit under a red flag and change to the grippier tyres.

Kiwi veteran Craig Baird saw enough before the order was given to make the decision off his own bat, happy enough to start from the back of the grid if it meant getting the jump on the rest of the field weather-wise.

But moments later, race control called the race off.

“We did the formation lap, I came in to change into wets and though I was at the back of the queue, it would have given me the advantage by the time everyone else either changed or tried to go out there in normal tyres,” Baird said.

“I’ve never seen a race just wiped completely before, just because of rain.

“If people want to race on slicks, that’s fine, that’s their choice, but why should I be punished because I made the right decision in the first place?”

Baird mounts a good argument.

And an understandable one, given that he missed out on a golden opportunity to pull back some ground on series leader Nick Foster.

Baird was third at that stage with Steven Richards in second.

The general consensus around the garages echoed the New Zealander’s sentiments.

He knew that it could prove costly in his championship quest.

“Having made that call to put the wets on, this was my chance to catch up,” he said.

“The strangest thing about it all is that we didn’t even go out and do a race lap. You could almost understand it if we’d been out there and something had happened.

“If it’s raining in the morning [Sunday] before the third race, are they going to just abandon that one as well?”

Afterwards, driver Richard Muscat posted this from his Twitter account.

“That was the scariest lap of Bathurst I have ever done and I didn’t go over 40 kilometres an hour!,” he wrote.