Bright start and a 'fairytale' ending stun favourites at test Record setter ... Jason Bright on his way to the day's fastest time at Sydney Motorsport Park. JASON BRIGHT was among the few who weren't astonished that he set the pace in the V8 Supercars pre-season test at Sydney Motorsport Park on a day of surprises and disappointments. Bright confounded the old order during the first serious hit-out of V8s' new-generation racers with a record-breaking lap time in his Holden VF Commodore. With his Brad Jones Racing teammate Fabian Coulthard close behind, Bright's unexpected speed - the culmination of being the quickest or among the fastest all day - eclipsed many more fancied runners. The test day was the first en masse outing of the revamped Fords and Holdens, and all-new Mercedes-Benzes and Nissans, built to the game-changing Car Of The Future Rules. It was the unofficial start of the V8 Supercars season, which begins with the March 1-3 Adelaide 500, followed by a non-championship appearance at Albert Park from March 14-17 as the major support to the Australian formula one Grand Prix. Bright's fastest lap of the 3.93 km SMSP circuit at Eastern Creek was one minute, 28.9655 seconds, establishing an unofficial track record for V8 Supercars. It was 0.2838s quicker than the previous unofficial mark set by Craig Lowndes in the pre-season test at the then Eastern Creek Raceway two years ago. Coulthard's best lap in the sister BJR VF Commodore was just four-hundredths of a second slower, with Lowndes a further three-tenths of a second behind. The fact that two BJR cars were comfortably quickest was a surprise because the Albury-based team is neither one of the glamour squads nor previously a front-runner. It is a tight-knit operation without the financial resources of the big teams and has only two victories in more than a decade, with both scored by Bright in a short-lived mid-season burst in 2011. But the result - even if it isn't a guaranteed guide to form once the field reaches the Adelaide Parkland street circuit at the end of the month - took most observers aback. While Bright, winner of the Bathurst 1000 in 1998, has been competitive throughout his career and a regular winner with more powerful teams earlier in his V8s career, he and BJR weren't expected to beat the established front-runners on speed amid the radical change of technical specifications. But Bright wasn't taken by surprise, predicting 10 days ago during a corporate dinner at Bathurst that he and his team would be in good shape under the new rules, which he described as "a level playing field" that gave the middle-order teams a fighting chance. "The car was good from the word go," he said. I was confident we were going to be somewhere near the mark. I had a good crack at it and I think it's indicative of the fact that as a team, we've made a big step forward. Co-owner Brad Jones said his team's one-two was "a fairytale, really." Ranking alongside as a major shock was the pace of the new factory-backed Nissan Altima in the hands of former V8s champion and team co-owner Rick Kelly. Despite a late decision by the Nissan Motorsport team to bring only two of its four cars to the test, Kelly finished fifth quickest, just six-tenths of a second off Bright's pace.