The five-team V8 Supercars contingent is ready to tackle the KL City GP circuit for the first time on Friday after completing set-up duties at the brand new Malaysian street circuit.

The cars from Red Bull (Craig Lowndes), Prodrive (Chaz Mostert), Nissan (Todd Kelly), Volvo (Scott McLaughlin) and Erebus (Will Davison) will run in two 20 minute practice sessions tomorrow ahead of the weekend’s three demonstration races.

Teams and drivers have inspected sections of the 3.2km course over the last two days while it is still open to traffic, but will not be able to complete full track walks until early tomorrow morning.

“From what we’ve seen, it’s narrow in some places but wide in others,” explained Craig Lowndes, who will be the first driver on track in the morning courtesy of a Red Bull promotion.

“It looks a bit different to what we’re used to, but we won’t know for sure until we drive around it.

“Essentially though it’s a street circuit with the usual mix of 90 degree corners and chicanes.”

The teams are operating with a skeleton crew of staff as well as extremely limited spares packages for the fly-away event.

With showcasing V8 Supercars to the region the primary objective, the demonstration races are expected to be ‘friendly’ affairs.

“We’ll put on a good show, but at the end of the day it’s a demonstration event and nobody wants to see a car in the wall,” said Lowndes’ race engineer Grant McPherson.

“In terms of a spares package, we’ve got a spare front bumper bar and a lot of stickers, that’s about it. If anyone has damage it’ll be the end of their weekend.”

The drivers, including Volvo’s McLaughlin, are however insisting that they’ll be pushing the limits against their rivals.

“We’re racing drivers, so at the end of the day we’re going to have a crack,” said McLaughlin. “We’re showcasing the sport, but we’ll have a bit of fun as well.”

Nissan is the only team running one of its race chassis (KR002, usually campaigned by Rick Kelly) at the event.

Of the spare cars, Red Bull (888-030), Prodrive (FPR 1215) and Erebus (EM001) have brought their first completed Car of the Future chassis, while GRM is running its first Volvo (GRM 016).

Teams will meanwhile have no live telemetry to look at when the cars are on track, with V8 Supercars only providing limited, non-performance related data for analysis after the sessions.

The restrictions have been put in place to limit the advantage for the participating teams ahead of the planned championship event at the venue next year.

“We’ll see what we can learn,” said McPherson, noting that the lack of data will place a greater emphasis on driver feedback to drive any set-up changes.

“It’s hard without the data and your normal tuning tools available, but it’ll certainly be of benefit for the drivers.”

Each car has been allocated three sets of soft tyres each and, with no pre-marked rubber, will likely run a single set across Friday in order to save the remaining two for qualifying and the races.

VIDEO: See more from the V8 Supercars paddock at the KL City GP