Team 18 turned a spare chassis into a complete car in just five days following the Bathurst 1000, where Reynolds crashed heavily in qualifying.

Driven to the Gold Coast from Melbourne in the Team 18 transporter, the new car was taken to Ipswich on a flatbed truck and given its permitted 60km of running.

“The team has worked tirelessly over the last week to pull it all together after our Bathurst incident,” said Reynolds following the shakedown.

“As soon as I rolled up the lane, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.

“The boys and girls in the workshop have done a phenomenal job just to put everything back to how it was.

“When you swap so many components from one chassis to another, things can be missed, but today everything was spot on.

“It’s great to have that new car feeling and new car smell and I’m excited to see what we can achieve this weekend.”

Team manager Adrian Burgess also hailed his squads efforts and a successful shakedown, having made the call to build-up the new car on Sunday night at Mount Panorama.

“The car rolled out today without a single problem, only a few little niggly things like TPMS (Tyre Pressure Monitoring) sensors not working and seatbelts for Davey, but fundamentally the car ran really well,” he said.

“It’s a nice thing for everyone, knowing you can go into Practice 1 on Friday and you have found out all the little bugs already.

“Hopefully we can go down to Surfers now, finish the unload, put the car in the garage.

“Tomorrow we’ll just check the setup and everything, and then Friday, roll out into practice knowing that everything’s good, all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed, and we can be hopefully competitive straight out the gate.”

Reynolds is the reigning winner on the Gold Coast, having taken out the Sunday race in 2023 aboard a Grove Racing Ford Mustang.