David Reynolds is sure he and engineer Alistair McVean can develop another race-winning package at Kelly Grove Racing, just as they did together at Erebus Motorsport.

The long-term driver-engineer combination worked side-by-side for more than four years at the Holden squad, taking Reynolds from 16th overall in 2016 to top seven championship finishes the following three years.

That span included four wins, headlined by the 2017 Bathurst 1000.

It’s well documented what happened from there; a breakdown of relations with the team hierarchy last year leading both Reynolds and McVean to KGR and its second-year Mustang programme.

Now running the #26, the season-opening round at Mount Panorama brought solid placings of ninth and 11th as he and team-mate Andre Heimgartner matched each other for pace for the bulk of the weekend.

Not content in the midfield, Reynolds is embracing the challenge of building up a car that can challenge the regular front-running outfits.

“It’s a big challenge. Realistically there’s only a couple of teams in pit lane that are consistently on the front row all of the time,” he told Speedcafe.com.

“It’s up to us to build a package to take it to them.

“We’ve done it before in the past and we can do it again. There’s no doubt that we’re going to do it, it’s just a matter of when.”

Reynolds said the three-week break between the Mount Panorama 500 and the Penrite Oil Sandown SuperSprint on March 20-21 will be used to good effect.

“You don’t really get a lot of test miles to sort of understand stuff,” he added.

“[The Mount Panorama 500 was] really a large test session for us but overall we were ninth and 11th which is pretty much mid-pack.

“Is it good? Probably not. We want to be at the pointy end so we have got a lot of things that we think know what we need, we just need to go do it and test it.

“It just takes time, you have got to have a rational, methodical, non-emotional approach to it.”

KGR is currently perched fifth in the teams’ championship.