"Practice early was a bit confusing as our tyres were nowhere and didn't give us much chance to tune the car the way we would have liked,” said Todd. “This gives us more work to do tomorrow and again means making substantial changes each step of the way. There are eight genuine contenders who could get pole tomorrow and it's a matter of who does the best job of getting optimum tyre grip.”

“We ran around on second hand tyres early but finished up with a good time on new tyres although there is still plenty of work to do,” added Skaife. “The car is not flowing too well and the track bumps are worse so it took a while to sort that out. Let's see how we go tomorrow.”

Defending champion and current championship leader, Rick Kelly was fifth - and although he was less than happy with his car's handling on the bumpy circuit, he said he and his engineers had made good progress that would provide 'pointers' for further improvement for Saturday qualifying.

“It would probably be a little bit wrong to complain about being in fifth spot, because there are a lot of guys behind us who would like to be there. But I think we have the equipment under us to do a better job, so probably weren't 100 per cent successful with setting that car up right and driving it right,” he explained. “If there is a positive out of it all, we got a good bit of feedback from the changes we made, and I am confident we can make changes to improve.”

Russell Ingall, who set the current practice lap record in August of 2001 with a time of 1.09.9367, came in just outside the top five when the two hour and fifteen minute session came to a close.

Placing sixth fastest overall, 'The Enforcer' can now claim the mantle as the fastest Queenslander on today's time-sheets despite the fact that 11 drivers claim the Ipswich circuit as their home track.

“The day was a little different, but at the end of it we have a pretty good race car,” said Ingall. “We struggled a bit with balance and brakes early in the session and actually ended up in the sand trap at the end of the back straight at one stage. We changed both brake pads and discs after that and the difference was night and day.

“We are only 0.3 of a second off the quickest car today and we used nothing like new tyres. I think we have a solid race package on the Caltex Falcon and I look forward to making plenty of progress tomorrow. This is our first home race of the year and we will have plenty of fans out there flying the Caltex and Ford flags for us. It would be great if we could get the job done for them.”

Further down the order, Jim Beam Racing's Will Davison was seventh, followed by Team Vodafone's Craig Lowndes and Valvoline Cummins Race Team duo, Lee Holdsworth and Dean Canto.

“The car is very good on race runs,” said Lowndes. “We made some adjustments after the first half of practice to finalise balance but we actually overcompensated.