Sirromet Wines Holden Commodore driver Paul Morris continued🐎 his recent form surge by leading his team to fourth fastest overall position in today's opening two practice sessions for the Betta E🌃lectrical Sandown 500 V8 Supercar Championship endurance race in Melbourne on Sunday.

Morris, who is contesting the ninth round of the championship with John Faulkner as team-mate, was tenth quickest in the firstꦺ practice session with a best lap of 1 minute 12.486🐼 second around the 3.1km circuit.

In the second practice session the 35-year-old Gold Coast driver was third fastest with an improved lap time of 1m 11.702s in his VY Commodore, powered by a Holden Moto꧂rsport engine. He set the time on his final lap of the session on a new set of Dunlop control tyres.

Morris' best lap time in the second practice left his team fourth overall among the 35 two-man combinations who participated in the two sessions. The M🎀ark Skaife-Todd Kelly team clocked the quickest lap in the two practices with 1m 11.496s in a Holden Racing Team Commodore in the second session.

The Sirromet Wines Commodore did a total of 50 laps in the two sessions, with Morris doing 𓃲the bulk of the driving.

"There's less than half-a-second between the top 10 so it looks like a close race on Sunday," commented Morris, "We spent most of the day working on improving our race set-up, but at the end of the second session I put some new tyres on to see what sort of time the car could do. I was baulked on ওmy best lap, but the time was still okay. Overall we're about 80-percent there with setting up the car.

"We made several changes to the springs and ꦦ'shocks' and improved the front-end grip. However, we need to get the power down better because the car isn't as consistent as I'd like. The plan tomorrow is to qualify in the top 🐭10 to get into the Shoot Out, like the last couple of races, and go hard on Sunday."

Faulkner,🌃 who is making his debut for the team at Sandown, drove 13 laps in the two se𝕴ssions. He added: "Today was all about Paul chasing the car set-up, which is fine because in all honesty I don't need a lot of laps around here. My role is to get comfortable in the car on full tanks and so forth.

"Everything is ticking along, alt♍hough we would both like better power down co𝓰ming onto the straights. The thing I noticed was it's hard to get a clean lap in because of all the traffic. A few guys were spearing off and there was quite a lot of debris and oil on the track."