Nissan surprised by first test pace

Rick Kelly broke the new Nissan Altima in to the top five of the first official 2013 V8 Supercars test at Sydney Motorsport Park and the Nissan team was surprised by their pace.
“The pace has been, I’d almost say surprising, we still have a lot of work to do on the engine side still by refining our engine package, but the way the car is handling has probably masked that and almost overcome it,” said team mate and brother Todd Kelly.

Rick Kelly’s best time was about six tenths from the fastest time, set by Jason Bright.
“Everyone’s not necessarily trying to go fast, but working through their programs and so are we, so for us to show that amount of speed up front I think is very promising and now we just need to learn a little bit more about the car, which will give us really good confidence heading into Clipsal,” said Rick Kelly.

Nissan opted to just run two cars, for Rick Kelly and James Moffat, of their total four cars in this test with a private test scheduled for this week.
“We’ve got one test day under our belt here at Eastern Creek and all of the engineers have done a great job to tune the cars and get the pace out of them, so I’m extremely pleased with the pace of the cars. I can’t wait to get to Winton next week with our second two cars and I think we’ll be in a pretty good place when we get to Adelaide and certainly with something that we can build on through the year,” said Todd Kelly.