Prodrive Racing’s Chaz Mostert finished the Super Test with the fastest lap and heads into the Clipsal 500 confident of a strong performance at Clipsal 500.

THE YOUNG 2014 Bathurst 1000 winner, Mostert, set the fastest time in the one-lap ARMOR ALL SuperShootout at the weekend’s SuperTest, just beating James Courtney by 0.028 seconds to record 1min30.6583. Following the result Prodrive Racing (Australia) team boss, Tim Edwards, declared Mostert to be a solid championship contender for 2015.

“He’s a year older, he’s a lot more experienced, he’s a Bathurst winner – to be honest, there’s no coaching I need to be doing, he’s just grown within himself,” Edwards told V8 Supercars.

“He’s learned a lot, he’s raced cars, he did thousands of kilometres last year; his race craft’s improved.

“Both of them [Mostert and Mark Winterbottom] are going to be fighting for the championship.” Teammate, Mark Winterbottom was just 0.056 seconds off the pace, giving Ford a first and third in the SuperShootout.

On his one lap dash, Mostert said: “It’s fantastic to get a pole position even if it isn’t in an official round. The guys at Prodrive Racing have done a fantastic job over Christmas, they didn’t even have a break so it’s really rewarding for those guys.

“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. We thought the balance would be a bit different from our normal setup but it settled in quite well.

“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.”

It wasn’t all good news for the Ford cars with the front bonnet buffeting at high speed. Both Prodrive and DJR Team Penske which is running an FG X for Marcos Ambrose will work on finding a solution for the flexing of the bonnet. Although, Prodrive’s other two drivers, David Reynolds and Andre Heimgartner will continue to race FG

Falcons with an upgrade to the FG X dependent on how the cars fare at the Clipsal 500 this month (February).

“One of the biggest things we have to sort out is the flexing of the front body, the bonnet… we’ll look at the integrity of that, where it intersects at the front bumper. We’ve just got to tidy up all that.

“Given we only got the bumper on the car four hours before it went into the truck for the first time [to get to the test], we knew it was a bit rushed to get it together.

“Overall we are really encouraged by the development work we undertook this weekend, not only on the FG X but by the team as a whole. Of course to see the big gain in one lap pace with Chaz’s effort in the shootout was a big bonus, I think we all feel the gains we believed we’d found with the FG X have come to life so it gives us a good base to work from for Clipsal and beyond.”