IT may have been nearly 100 days since the Porsche Paynter Dixon Carrera Cup Australia field took to the track, but the moment the field returned to the track today at Hidden Valley Raceway in Darwin it was abundantly clear that nothing has changed.ย
Two intense practice sessions have set the tone for the third round of the championship in the Top End, with the pair of sessions topped by Dylan O’Keeffe and Harri Jones, respectively.
However it was the second session of the day that properly set the tone as Jones’ headed a Equity-One Professional class field as tight as any in the championship.
Jones’ topped the charts by 0.006 seconds with O’Keeffe second and David Russell a further 0.007 seconds further back in third.
Double Darwin winner Dale Wood was fourth – a comparatively large 0.085 seconds from Jones’ – while Marcos Flack was fifth and Oscar Targett sixth.
Glenn Wood, Angelo Mouzouris, Hamish Fitzsimmons and Marco Giltrap completed the top 10 however the relative margins between them were negligible, the difference between fifth and 10th in the session just 0.05 seconds.
In the end just 0.53 covered all Equity-One Professional Class runners in the remarkable scorecard that had all the hallmarks of qualifying rather than a mere practice session.
Earlier in the cooler conditions of the morning, Dylan O’Keeffe set the quickest time of the day to top practice one ahead of teammate Jackson Walls and Harri Jones, with Wood fourth and Mouzouris fifth.
In Pro-Am two different drivers topped the two sessions, with Matt Belford quickest in practice one over Rodney Jane and Matt Slavin. The afternoon session saw Jane – fresh from a trip to compete at Le Mans – top the charts ahead of Slavin, with Belford surviving a spin at turn one to finish third.
The two relatively-incident free sessions point to an intense qualifying session tomorrow morning, to be followed by the opening sprint race of the weekend – both sessions will be shown live on Fox Sports and Kayo, while the race will also be live on the screens of Seven around Australia.