“In the end the car balance was very good and I was on for a great lap with 10 minutes to go but made an error on the last corner that ruined our hopes of a top three finish. We are very confident of putting together a good qualifying setup and we know we have a great race package.”

Castrol FPR Falcon driver Steve Richards was just outside the top ten and eleventh quickest. Richards endured a difficult session on very old tyres, but has showed good pace from which to build a strong performance this weekend.

“We made some good headway throughout the session and finished the day pretty close to the front of the pack,” said Richards.

“Overall I'm pretty pleased, we made a number of changes throughout the session, some of them worked and some didn't. The pace shown by Frosty [my team-mate] is encouraging and I'm confident of joining him at the top of the timesheets tomorrow.”

Steve Ellery was twelfth on his comeback to the V8 Supercar Championship. Ellery, who has not raced full-time in the championship since the end of 2005, clocked a best lap time of 1-minute 11.151-seconds.

“I haven't raced a V8 Supercar since Bathurst nine months ago so I didn't know what to expect today,” he admitted. “My best lap was done on new tyres right at the end and I'm happy with the time. It's a good start, but qualifying tomorrow will be a better indication where I'm at speed-wise.

“I haven't done the new qualifying format which came in this year so that's another challenge. I spent the first half of the (practice) session just 'dialling' myself in and getting used to being in a V8 Supercar again. I told the engineers what the car was doing and they softened the suspension. The car had too much understeer when I started the session, but the changes improved the grip.”

Of the rest, Jamie Whincup, Steven Johnson and James Courtney were 13th, 14th and 15th respectively, the latter somewhat disappointed as he had been quick at the start of the session. He lost time with high levels of front end movement.

“The Jeld-Wen Falcon was quite speedy straight out today as we would hope to be at our test track,” said Courtney. “Unfortunately the car deteriorated throughout the session; we had an issue with a lot of movement in the front.

“With a race car you want everything to be as precise as it can be; it affected the car quite a bit so we didn't get a chance to have a good run on new tyres. The guys will work on that overnight and we're confident it will be right for tomorrow. We definitely have the speed to be in the top three; Russell didn't have a great run today but was still sixth. If I can compete with him we'll be right.”

All-in-all, the half way point of the 2007 Championship has started with incredible competitiveness and the top 27 drivers were all separated by less than one second.