Ford to the fore in Sydney test

It's very early days, but the indications from the weekend's V8 Supercars 'Super Test' are the new Ford Falcon FG X is a contender.

Young gun Chaz Mostert, 22, topped the timesheets for the full field shootout that completed the two day test, with Prodrive Racing Australia team-mate Mark Winterbottom fourth.

It was the first time a Falcon has been fastest qualifier since Winterbottom in an FG at the Phillip Island round of the championship in November 2013 – not that Mostert's effort at Sydney Motorsport Park yesterday officially breaks the drought.

An aerodynamic downforce deficiency has been blamed for the Falcon's speed issues over the last couple of years and the homologation of the FG X gave the team and Ford the chance to rectify the issues.

There would be a certain irony if the FG X did turn out to be the class of the field, considering the blue oval ends its association with the team (formerly known as Ford Performance Racing) at the end of this season.

The only obvious issue for the FG Xs at SMP was the buffeting of the bonnet at high speed, something that will have to be fixed before the Clipsal 500 opens the championship in Adelaide on February 26-March 1.

Mostert was cautiously optimistic about what his effort on a hot and greasy track on hard tyres signified.

"It's fantastic to get a pole position even if it isn't in an official round," he said. "It was great to put a new car on the track and it hasn't skipped a beat all weekend and when the time counts we can do a quick lap in it so it's definitely a bit better than what we had last year.

"The biggest difference we have noticed in the car is going around high speed corners. We've still got a few tweaks to make to make it that little bit better but overall it's reasonably balanced so we're quite excited and so we can't wait to go to Clipsal."

In a typically close V8 shoot-out, Mostert was followed by Shane van Gisbergen (Tekno) and James Courtney (Holden Racing Team), both testing out Commodores with aerodynamic modifications to the rear wing for 2015. Behind Winterbottom came Volvo Polestar Racing's Scott McLaughlin and Nissan's James Moffat.

The performance of the Fords emerged as the obvious story from the largely uneventful test, which had attracted much pre-publicity and criticism for being staged head-to-head against the Bathurst 12-hour in what was very much a television-driven conflict between new broadcaster Foxsports and Channel 7, which picked up the rights to the B12H after losing out on the V8s.

V8 Supercars claimed a record attendance of more than 27,000 for the Super Test – which you'd hope would be the case considering it had doubled in duration.

Meanwhile, back on track, the revised Nissan Altima with its massive new outboard-mounted rear wing also showed promise at SMP with Rick and Todd Kelly dominating the timesheets on Saturday, although they were not in contention on Sunday. Instead, Moffat was the star performer and team-mate Michael Caruso would have been up there too, but was excluded because his car was late exiting pitlane for his run.

The usually dominant Red Bull Commodores were not contenders, with six-time and defending champion Jamie Whincup only 12th and Craig Lowndes eighth with new engineer Grant McPherson. It's not worth reading too much into that because this team was also off the pace at last year's test and like a bunch of other teams had a limited tyre bank which made good times hard to attain.

"It's been great to get back in the car, but we've been running around on old tyres all day," Whincup said on Sunday. "We had absolutely nothing left from yesterday, so to be honest we haven't learnt as much as we were hoping to with the tyre situation."

In other outcomes from the test: