Reigning V8 Supercar champion Garth Tander expects his first ever Bathurst pole position will count for very little Sunday.
The Holden hotshot held his fancied Ford rivals at bay with a lap of 2mins:07.2963secs around the iconic Mount Panorama circuit in Saturday's top ten shootout.
But he said by lap 10 of 161 in the gruelling 1000km showpiece the starting grid would be all but forgotten.
Tander's five-time Bathurst winning teammate Mark Skaife agreed, saying: "There's a very long way to go yet."
"We're obviously very happy to start on pole but ten laps into the race I'm not too sure whether anyone will care where we started," said Tander, who leads the V8 Supercar championship.
Joining them on the front row of the grid will be Ford Performance Racing's Mark Winterbottom and Steven Richards, Winterbottom's one-lap dash just over one-tenth of a second slower.
"(Qualifying) really means absolutely nothing," said Richards, the two-time winner agreeing with Tander's sentiments.
"In the past I've been fortunate enough to win from 15th so that goes to show how much it means in terms of the race result."
The second row will be made up of Ford's James Courtney and David Besnard and the Holden of Paul Dumbrell and Rick Kelly.
Kelly was originally paired with Paul Radisich for the weekend but Radisich was involved in a horror crash Saturday morning, breaking his ankle and leaving the Toll HSV No.15 car irreparable in time for Sunday.
The incident appeared to leave Kelly without a drive but in bizarre scenes the co-driver in HSV's No.16 entry, David Reynolds, was pulled out due to "exceptional circumstances" leaving a spot free for Kelly to join regular fulltime teammate Dumbrell.
Reynolds had been on the drip during the week battling gastroenteritis but still drove in the second-tier Fujitsu series race Saturday.
In the end the team deemed Reynolds would not be capable of completing his full stint in the Great Race.
"I'm obviously stoked to be able to have a car but it's a hard one because my thoughts are still with Paul," said Kelly, also a two-time champion.
"It's mixed emotions, to be honest."
Defending champions Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes will start from fifth for Ford as they attempt an historic third straight title, which would make them only the fourth and fifth men to ever achieve the feat.
"It's not the smoothest lap I've done around Mount Panorama.
"Hopefully Lowndesy's happy with that," Whincup said.
Holden's Jason Richards and Greg Murphy qualified sixth.
It was a disappointing result for the all-Kiwi pairing considering Richards clocked an incredible 2:06.9076 to top the practice charts in the morning session.
The time was the second-fastest ever around the mountain, Richards' teammate Murphy setting the lap record of 2:06.8594 in 2003.