The 22-year-old managed to salvage a seventh-place result from 20th on the grid to finish a tough weekend for Triple Eight on a positive note.

Feeney’s dire qualifying slot was due to an ill-fated decision not to do a second new tyre run in Q1, masking overnight gains made with the performance of the Red Bull Camaros.

“It was heaps of fun,” said Feeney of Sunday’s race.

“It was probably one of the most enjoyable races I’ve certainly had in a long time, maybe in my Supercars career, to come from 20th to seventh and get so close to fifth in the end.

“Huge credit to the team for digging deep and not dropping the bottom lip after qualifying.

“It was obviously a pretty tough start to the day and, you know, we can’t keep having bad results, so to come back and realistically close the championship gap in that last race was awesome.

“If we could obviously start the weekend with the car that we ended with, I think we’d be able to fight for wins. But that’s racing. We’ll learn from it.”

Feeney recounted the “hectic” battles he’d experienced throughout the 200km contest, during which he ran a long first stint to enjoy a tyre offset against his rivals later on.

The charge gave Feeney a new appreciation for the rough-and-tumble nature of the racing that is occurring in the mid-pack this season.

“I’ve been lucky enough to be up the grid and haven’t actually had to witness it but being in the pack it was pretty wild,” he said.

“It’s pretty crazy and you can see when you pass someone if you touch them, if you touch them at all, they try and get you back in the next corner.

“So I had some awesome battles out there. There’s a lot of guys that race really respectably. There’s some that make it harder than others and some that aren’t happy with how you do it.

“But anyway, I thought I had a good race against all the guys out there, it was just a fun race.”

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Will Brown, who qualified just 12th after a mistake at a critical moment in Q2, followed Feeney home in eighth place but had a very different race to his teammate.

“I sort of made a mistake when I pitted, the guys weren’t ready and it was probably a bit too early, so I had to manage the tyres a lot for the stints home,” he explained.

“I think it didn’t impact our race overall too badly but still it definitely did hurt us. So, a little bit disappointing.”

As for the aggressive nature of the mid-pack action?

“I sort of got out of it because of when I pitted,” he said.

“But I did in the first stint see cars running into each other and thought that, you know, I might have come out with some damage. But I was pretty lucky to get away with it.”

Brown narrowly avoided sanction following an investigation into an alleged breach of pit lane speed limiter rules during the race.

The reigning champion extended his points lead over Ford star Cam Waters, with Feeney now fourth behind the weekend’s Jason Richards Trophy winner, Matt Payne.