TeamVodafone’s Jamie Whincup has returned to the top of the time sheets, recording the fastest time of the day in his brand new chassis at Darwin’s Hidden Valley Raceway.

Whincup and the team, spent the two sessions putting the new car through a number of set-up changes to see how it would respond in the hot conditions.

Buoyed by today’s result, Whincup acknowledged there was room for improvement but said they were heading in the right direction.

“I am really happy to be quickest today. That was the first practice session with the new car and to go 1 from 1 is nice,” Whincup said.

“If we do the same thing tomorrow we will be struggling a bit so we need to go away and make some improvements.

“We made a heap of changes throughout that session and we put very good tyres on at the end so we expected to be up the front,” Whincup admitted.

Unlike his team-mate, Craig Lowndes didn’t benefit from putting on new tyres. The TeamVodafone driver aborted his potential hot lap due to the car not responding as they had thought and opted to save those tyres for tomorrow.

“I started a lap but we didn’t really get the tyre set up right so we opted to save the tyres for tomorrow,”Lowndes explained.

“We’ve made a number of changes to the car, some of them I felt, some of them I didn’t feel.

“Unfortunately, due to tyre degradation, it was a little hard to get an indication of balance but it’s encouraging the car is working really well on a used set of tyres,” he continued.

Earlier in the day both Whincup and Lowndes took to the track with two new differentials as part of an evaluation for V8 Supercars.

The V8 Supercars will be back on track for qualifying at 11:20am tomorrow with the Top Ten Shootout to follow at 12:20pm. Race 13 (42-Laps) of the V8 Supercar Championship Series will commence at 3:35pm.

Top Ten V8 Supercar Practice Results – Hidden Valley Raceway

1. Jamie Whincup, 1:09.8066
2. Mark Winterbottom, 1:09.8289
3. Todd Kelly, 1:09.9989
4. Steven Richards, 1:10.0262
5. James Courtney, 1:10.0289
6. Alex Davison, 1:10.1218
7. Shane Van Gisbergen, 1:10.1473
8. Tim Slade, 1:10.1562
9. Will Davison, 1:10.1612
10.Jason Bargwanna, 1:10.2182
13. Craig Lowndes, 1:10.3693