Ford’s David Reynolds now the quickest man around Mount Panorama
The final 50-minute run of the day at the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 saw two red flags, with both Volvo's Robert Dahlgren and Holden Racing Team's Garth Tander involved in separate incidents at The Dipper.
Tander's crash – which has reportedly suffered both front and rear suspension damage – triggered a red flag late in the session.
"I just clipped the inside-wall on the right-hander just before the Dipper and it just fired me straight into the outside-wall and hit the left-front pretty hard," Tander said.
"It was my mistake, and not at a high-risk part of the track either. I made a car positioning error and paid a big price.
"I'm a bit frustrated because it¹s a lot of work for the boys that we didn't need to do. It's probably more damage that we would have liked, but nothing unfixable.
"The HRT Commodore is pretty good speed-wise, but we'll fix it up overnight and give it another go tomorrow."
With just under five minutes to go, the V8 Supercars field was let loose, a mini-shootout to determine the quickest men for Friday.
The names swamped Rick Kelly, Tander and James Moffat – who looked on for top three finishes – and following Reynolds by just 0.109sec was stablemate and defending Bathurst Champion Mark Winterbottom.
"It feels pretty good to have the current lap record at Bathurst," Reynolds said of beating the record practice time of Craig Lowndes and the famous ‘Lap of the Gods' qualifying time set by Greg Murphy in 2003.
"It's kind of weird having grown up Murphy smash the lap record and then here I am today beating it. It's only practice though so I need three more days of this to make it count."
Fabian Coulthard, Scott McLaughlin, Jason Bright, Shane van Gisbergen, James Courtney, Lowndes, Moffat and Chaz Mostert completed the top 10. Current V8 Supercars Champion Jamie Whincup was down in 17th.
Red flags were triggered in each of the day's practice runs, with David Wall suffering a flat tire in the first session and wild card entry Andre Heimgartner spinning in the second.
Tomorrow's V8 Supercar action kicks off at 9.30am with a co-driver only practice session, all drivers at 1.10pm and ARMOR ALL Qualifying at 3pm AEST.