Anton De Pasquale has attributed his early pace at the Supercars Betr Darwin Triple Crown to a “different direction” for the Shell V-Power Racing Team.

The 27-year-old set the pace in Friday practice at Hidden Valley with a 1:06.2857s in the latter of the two half-hour sessions, which he finished 0.0346s faster than Tickford Racing’s James Courtney.

Notably, it was a performance which came on the first day of official Supercars action since Dick Johnson Racing and the other three Sunshine State-based teams tested at Queensland Raceway earlier this month.

That was their first in-season test of the Gen3 era, after which Team Principal Ben Croke pointed out that it was a trouble-free outing for DJR, as opposed to a series of niggles which blighted its pre-season.

“There’s very limited stuff you can do with these cars but there’s some different directions you can go, it seems,” explained De Pasquale, who bounced back from an early off in Practice 2 at Turn 7.

“We’ve elected to go a different one and it seems to be better.

“Whether that is [applicable] today, tomorrow, the rest of the year… who knows? But, it seemed better today [ie Friday], which is promising.”

The Victorian was concise about exactly what DJR seems to have found.

“It’s just a making grip thing; it’s one of those things,” he said.

“Around here, it seems okay over one lap but, try and start lap two, it’s pretty hard work.

“So, race pace and race deg and all that stuff’s still going to be really hard, so we’ll see.”

De Pasquale headed up an all-Ford Mustang top three in practice, a result which stands in stark contrast to the fact that Chevrolet Camaros have won 11 of 12 races in the year to date.

The Mustangs are running this weekend on an evolution of the ‘V3 Test’ engine map which was the fastest of the three calibrations tried out by the Ford contingent tried in practice during the most recent event of the season, at Symmons Plains.

Additionally, some ran on a 30ms shift cut which was chosen for the competitive sessions at Symmons Plains and others, the standard 50ms.

Whether the Blue Oval’s relative dominance of Hidden Valley practice is mere coincidence or a function of the calibration remains to be seen.

However, De Pasquale’s tempering of expectations about race pace squares with claims that Mustang pilots have been forced to overdrive in an attempt to be competitive, hence prematurely wearing out their tyres.

Cameron Waters made for two Tickford drivers in the top three in practice in Darwin.

The 2020 and 2022 championship runner-up is currently sixth in the standings, 229 points behind Erebus Motorsport’s Brodie Kostecki, but believes he is still a chance of winning the title this year.

That is, if his race pace improves.

“I think we’re still in the hunt,” said Waters.

“We need to have a few good weekends for sure, but it’s still earlier in the year.

“So, get our race pace under control – which has been the drama for all the Fords this year – and then we might be able to go win some races, so that’s what we need to fix.”

Qualifying for Race 16 of the Repco Supercars Championship starts today at 11:30 local time/12:00 AEST.