But that would have put Jason Bright and his Team BOC Commodore on the front row in race five at Symmons Plains two weeks ago, where he instead he started seventh.

Bright is sitting eighth in the V8 Supercars championship, 78 points behind leader Will Davison, after two top-10 finishes and is confident ahead of the weekend’s trip to Phillip Island for round three.

“Two top-10 starts in Tasmania is good but there are some good guys out there at the moment, so there is no room to relax,” Bright said during a visit to Brad Jones’ Albury base.

“We’ve got to keep on qualifying well.

“It was a promising weekend and we learnt a few things as well so we are looking forward to Phillip Island.

“It’s early days to be thinking about the championship but these early rounds are always telling come the end of the year so it’s good to be in touch and we have a car capable of winning at certain rounds.

“We have identified a couple of areas that we can improve on and if we get it right we can pop out in front of that whole group.”

Teammate Tim Slade, in the BJR Freightliner car, showed what lies in store for the rest of the field after a storming drive from 18th on the grid to finish eighth in Tasmania.

Slade, who was also in Albury during the week, needs a good result this weekend to bridge the gap to the front runners after indifferent results have left him 189 points adrift.

“Saturday in Tasmania was the most amount of fun I’ve had in a race car for a while – the car was really good, looked after its tyres really well, which allowed us to run the strategy we ran and we had a top finish,” he said.

“Qualifying was a weakness, but we learnt a massive amount and we are still getting used to a new car, new  engineer-driver relationship.

“Everyone learns every weekend but I feel we are learning more than everyone else as we have come from a fresh start. We have a good qualifying car but one of the things we’re learning is how to get the most out of it.

“We’re only talking about a tenth and half of a second – that’s the difference between Brighty in seventh and me in 17th.

“It was nice to see a little glimmer of a result in Tasmania but now we’ll build on it.

“I’m feeling better each time I go out, in fact in Tasmania I felt I was getting the most from the car all weekend it was just about getting that last little bit from the new tyre in qualifying.

“We are not far away and I’m confident we’ll get there.”

The cars hit the track on Friday for practice, and have 27-lap race Saturday with the main 45-lap race on Sunday.