The veteran was running fourth in the early stages of the Supercars endurance curtain raiser when his Grove Mustang was tipped into a high-speed spin at Dandenong Road.
The issue proved to be a left-rear wheel that worked loose from the car, which tagged the armco barrier before coming to a rest in the turn 9 sand trap.
According to Tander there was little warning of the failure, with no alerts of a loss of tyre pressure on the dash.
In fact, he thought a loose sensation was simply a change in wind direction.
"It turned around the wrong way at the end of the hill," Tander told Fox Sports.
"I felt on the lap before that something was either bending, or something was going on in the left-rear. I was about to ask [race engineer] Al [McVean] up the back straight, because we were expecting a wind direction change, and I thought it was pulling the car around a bit.
"At no point did I think the wheel was loose. I didn't get any alarms on the dash that the tyre was going down. The little bit of surveying I did at the end [after the crash], the wheel obviously came off the car but the tyre was flat. I don't know what happened first."
When asked by pit reporter Riana Crehan if the crash was scary, Tander added: "You sort of know [at Dandenong Road] that this might be large. But it wasn't too bad. I got a lot of speed out of it and it was spinning on the tarmac. It hit the armco on the outside, it's done a fair bit of damage to the car.
"It's a shame, we had a really good car."
Tander was sharing the Grove entry with lead driver David Reynolds.
