Greg Murphy swept all three races at Manfeild’s second round of the BNT V8 SuperTourers championship, but Simon Evans pushed him hard and established himself as the new star of the series.

Aucklander Evans missed the overall round victory at The Sound 250 meeting by just one point – Murphy won the races but fellow Holden driver Evans scored extra points for his qualifying performance and for taking fastest lap in all three races.

“Simon just drove beautifully,” Murphy said after the final race. “He just pushed and pushed, he didn’t give up.

“It’s not easy – I was pushing eleven-tenths all the way. If I relaxed a bit he was right on me again.”

Evans comes from a real motor racing family – his father Owen was a top Porsche racer and land speed record setter, and younger brother Mitch is expected to contest a second season of GP2 this year.

He has been steadily developing as a driver of the high-power BNT V8 SuperTourers, but was held back by some bad luck last year.

“I think we’ve definitely made a breakthrough,” Evans said at the end of the meeting. “We’ve been chipping away.

“This race we probably had the fastest car – we set a new lap record and got the fastest lap.”

He led race one yesterday till his car slowed slightly with an electrical malfunction, which he admitted had been frustrating.

Evans has now also developed the ability to help the team fine-tune the car to get the most out of it,

“In the first practice we were only ninth fastest and now we’ve got the fastest car – that’s very rewarding,” he said.

Hamilton’s Ant Pedersen, a close second to Murphy in the 2013 championship, qualified on pole for race one yesterday but spun coming out of the first corner.

Today he raced his Ford Falcon to second in the first race, ahead of Evans, and came third in the finale.

Murphy, who also scored a clean sweep at the first round of the championship last month, increased his lead, He now has 553 points, well ahead of Andre Heimgartner (Auckland, Holden), with Pedersen third on 418, Richard Moore (Auckland, Holden) fourth on 409 and Evans, who had encountered misfortune in the first round, fifth on 392.

Heimgartner was third overall for the round, just ahead of Moore.

The next round of the BNT V8 SuperTourer championship, running within the Hankook Super Series, will be staged at Pukekohe on the weekend of March 22-23.