Wood leads warm-up for The Bend 500

The 20-minute session was mostly about pit stop and driver change practice with cars consistently cycling through the lane.

Amid all of that Ryan Wood jumped to the top before the midway point with a 1m50.596s that would never be bested.

The driver that got closest was Lochie Dalton with a 1m50.832s – although it wasn’t all smooth sailing for the Tickford wildcard driver.

At one point he survived a close call with Tony D’Alberto, the DJR Ford driver arriving at Turn 1 at speed as Dalton came out of the pits.

It forced D’Alberto to take evasive action to avoid a collision, although race control opted not to investigate the incident.

David Reynolds was third fastest ahead of Chaz Mostert and Tickford pair Thomas Randle and Cam Waters.

The warm-up also included a final rehearsal of the controversial slow zones procedure, with race control trialling a new dash configuration designed at giving drivers more information and easing reliance on radio communications.

According to highly-experienced co-driver Garth Tander, however, the new system didn’t work as planned.

“It sort of didn’t work,” he told Fox Sports.

“We were meant to do a slow zone simulation on the out-lap effectively, exit of turn 6 to exit of turn 10. We got the call on the out-lap that they’d aborted it, so started to get into it, warm the car, get ready to do a run. Then they said, ‘right, okay, now we’re going to do a slow zone test’.

“They are trying to give the drivers more information via the dash, but none of the configs work, it didn’t work. At least we did run that before for the race so that they’re not relying on that config going into the race.”

The Bend 500 kicks off at 1:45pm ACST.

Results: Repco Supercars Championship AirTouch 500 at The Bend, Warm-up