Holden Racing Team’s Mark Skaife set the benchmark in practice today for this weekend’s triple race program at Darwin’s Hidden Valley circuit. Skaife presented a clean set of heels to Toll HSV Dealer Team’s Rick Kelly and Ford’s Mark Winterbottom with a 1min 09.26sec fastest lap, while all of the Top 15 cars recorded lap times within a second of Skaife.
Todd Kelly was fifth fastest with 1min 09.8sec lap time.
Mark Skaife
“It was a good time, but by no means perfect. The VE lacked a bit of straight line speed, but cornered well. Need to change a few things tomorrow and increase grip, as others will make gains and it’s essential to maintain the edge we had in practice.
“It will also be great to keep the momentum going after our success at Eastern Creek. ”
Todd Kelly
“We had some problems through practice and couldn’t tune them out of the car. We threw new tyres on which gave us a reasonable time, but so did the rest of the field and we need to look setup-wise at that in qualifying tomorrow.
“You would think the cooler conditions would be easier on the drivers but the times did on really improve, due to natural track degradation from one year to the next. ”
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