All hail Australia's Best Driver's Car

They say it only rains 300 days per year in Tasmania's west. The other 65 days it just drips off the trees.

What they don't let on is the frightening regularity with which rain morphs into sleet and hail.

After making the 10-hour overnight journey across Bass Straight with 12 performance cars, three support cars, two airborne drones, 15 cameras and a massive team of people (one of whom is sporting an inexplicable black eye) the motoring.com.au crew is well and truly getting to grips with the 2017 contenders.

The roads have been a mixture of damp, wet, soaked and hail-covered. So handling flaws in any of the cars have been revealed in less time than it takes for a Tassie Tiger to hide from a camera.

And there are already favourites emerging.

As the only V8 in the competition, the HSV GTSR W1 has been a strong performer despite the ever-changing weather.

"It's incredibly fast, has great steering and you can feel almost everything that's happening at the wheels. It's a true driver's car and deserves to be at the pointy end of the field," said managing editor Marton Pettendy.

"I can't believe we're about to say goodbye to these cars," Andrea Matthews lamented.

Only in testing for Australia’s Best Driver’s Car would you find a GTSR W1 up against a Golf GTI 40th Anniversary (aka GTI Clubsport).

In fact the Golf is proving to be a rocket on the damp roads and has provided intense competition for the much bigger Aussie V8.

Some will be surprised to hear the GTSR W1 isn’t a lock-in to emerge as the best rear-wheel-drive car in contention as the BMW M140i has impressed everyone and could definitely upset a few of the more fancied runners.

And, confirming some of our judges are made of tough stuff, despite the inclement weather the roof of the Abarth 124 roadster has been dropped a few times. At $42,000, the Abarth is the most affordable car in the field and by no means the dullest.

Not expected in a program like this was an encounter with a forest-dwelling lobster-like crustacean.

Totally expected - and already in evidence amongst the judges – were robust discussions punctuated with equally robust language. Predictions are for this argy-bargy to continue until the very last story is posted.

And so far we’ve depleted Tasmania’s reserves of high-octane fuel to the tune of more than 1000 litres.

Easily the closest ABDC thus far, the third running of the event could go down to the wire.

With more than 3500km already in the books for the high-performance field, we’ll soon be heading south towards Hobart.

Racetrack and dragstrip testing beckons so we’re hoping for good news from the Bureau Of Meteorology.

Which car are you tipping?

Will the mighty Nissan GT-R prevail? You can’t possibly rule-out the astonishing Ford Focus RS. Or maybe the Audi S5 with its quattro all-wheel drive and tricky diffs will maintain the German dominance of our awards.

And don’t dismiss the Alfa Romeo Giulia QV or the new Porsche Cayman S? Both have brought new and very different 'tunes' to the Apple Isle – and ABDC.

ABDC 2017: The contenders
>> Abarth 124 Spider
>> Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio Verde
>> Audi S5 Coupe quattro
>> BMW M140i
>> BMW M3 Competition
>> Ford Focus RS
>> HSV GTSR W1
>> Infiniti Q60 Red Sport
>> Mercedes-AMG C 43 4MATIC
>> Nissan GT-R
>> Porsche Cayman S
>> Volkswagen Golf GTI 40 Years