Triple Eight gun Shane van Gisbergen snuck into the Newcastle 500 top 10 shootout by the skin of his teeth to breathe life into their Supercars teams' championship title tilt.
Jamie Whincup topped qualifying on the beachfront track while his teammate van Gisbergen clinched 10th in the dying seconds on Saturday morning.
Van Gisbergen struggled for pace on new tyres and only made the shootout by 0.0448 seconds on his final lap, as stars Mark Winterbottom, Will Davison and Chaz Mostert all missed out.
"We're in the 10 somehow but if I got told I was 50th I would have believed them," van Gisbergen said.