Greg Murphy: Tasmania promises to be devilishly difficult

Expect Supercars reigning champion Shane van Gisbergen to be pushing hard on the tight Tasmanian track. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion

This weekend's second round of the Supercars Championship in Tasmania might be the most closely fought we have seen for some time.

Competition is stronger than it has been and that was highlighted at the non-championship Australia Grand Prix round a fortnight ago.

The usual suspects were at the front but they were joined by a few others. The only one that wasn't there was series leader and reigning champion Shane van Gisbergen and I wouldn't read too much into that.

They might have been trying a few things that will come into Shane's benefit later on.

The Penske guys continued their big improvement after impressing in Adelaide. I think we are going to see them in that top half dozen cars a lot moving forward.

The Triple Eight guys will continue to be there. Jamie Whincup will be buoyed after being very racy at Melbourne.

Brad Jones Racing's Tim Slade was very fast as well.

Prodrive will be encouraged because Chaz Mostert was pretty consistent at the Grand Prix, which is awesome to see.

He is really gelling with engineer Adam de Borre. That is a good sign for Prodrive. They just need to work on getting Mark Winterbottom back into a groove.

You have a good gaggle of cars where on the day any one of them can stick it on the front row.

Tassie can throw up some awesome racing - the shape of the circuit, the hairpin down the far end, which is so critical and often throws up curveballs and there will be some guys desperate to get their championship going.

It is so tight and a very short lap - only about 51 seconds or so which means the field will be separated by only six or seven-tenths of a second during qualifying.

We will see some tight racing with the format that we've got.

I am definitely torn this weekend - I'm going off to work in one form of the sport but then I'll be focused on picking up all the latest updates on ChrisSport at Rally Otago.

It is a huge event there - 120 cars have entered and a whole bunch of AP4 cars at the front of the field.

I am jealous that I won't be able to get my Holden Barina out there but Josh Marston will be representing our team and he is thrilled about getting in his car for the first time.

We are really confident with the car - the testing we have done we were blown away with how good it felt on gravel.