24th to seventh: Percat's Tasmania rollercoaster

Heading to Tasmania, Nick Percat hadn't finished better than seventh in 23 starts at the Symmons Plains venue.

Come Sunday night, and Percat not only had a win, but reeled off a run to seventh that came after starting 24th and last.

Percat put together a man of the match performance in Sunday's Race 18 to rescue what could have been a disaster, with Matt Stone Racing getting it wrong in qualifying.

All told, Percat and teammate Cameron Hill both fought through the field, with Hill recovering to 12th after being sent off the track on the opening lap.

Percat was 20th in the queue when the first Safety Car was called, and restarted 14th amid a flurry of double stacks. From there, he picked off seven more cars in what proved a dramatic final stint, with Thomas Randle hitting Broc Feeney.

Critically, Percat consolidated sixth in the championship, with the 2011 Bathurst winner arresting a slide in form that saw him drop from fourth to ninth in recent rounds.

"Well, I had two PBs around here, even coming from last, better than my any other result I've had here, came to seventh," Percat said on Supercars.com's Schick Cool Down Lap podcast.

"I said this morning, if I could be in the top 10 again and have a solid day, I'd a hundred percent take it because this game's so tight.

"You know, you use Chaz [Mostert] as an example. He's been so fast the last few rounds and he only beat me by a couple of seconds [today].

"Plenty for us to learn from qualy, that the race car was crazy fast. I think it was probably fast enough to be on the front two rows again.

"So we'll probably just have a look at what we did wrong there and try not to do it again."

MSR was also fast over one lap, with Hill quickest in Sunday morning practice.

"I completely stuffed the first lap, threw it off the road and we were back in last, but the Safety Car brought us back in the race," Hill said.

"I got in a bit of a dog fight early on and didn’t really make any ground; there was another Safety Car, took some more tyres and then we actually had a pretty good race from there from last back up to 12th.

"Good recovery after a really bad start for me, but there’s lots of good stuff to take away from it."