His second-last lap of the hour long race in his new Audi R8 LMS Ultra - a 2:06.7605 - was the quickest he'd ever covered his 6.213 kilometre home track.

It was also a lap record for the GT World Challenge Australia trophy class at Bathurst.

"That's my new PB, that's the fastest lap I've done here," he said with a broad smile.

"It's actually a trophy class lap record so I'm pretty chuffed with that, it's bloody awesome."

The Bathurst driver headed into the final round of 2021 with a 25 point lead in the trophy class - putting him in ideal position for an overall series podium in his maiden GT World Challenge Australia tilt.

It's a position that got even better when he clocked his record on the way to placing eighth outright and second in class.

"It was a good race, we didn't step a foot wrong and the car was on rails after the few issues we had yesterday in quali. The guys made some changes in conjunction with our engineer and I honestly could not fault the car, it was perfect to drive in these conditions.

"We banked the extra points in the championship, so tomorrow we only basically need to finish the race."

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Schumacher went from eighth on the grid for the first of two races scheduled for the season-ender, his qualifying lap time of 2:07.2422 the second best in class.

Brett Hobson, his closest rival in the trophy class, qualified his Nissan GT3 in position three.

From the rolling start Schumacher was hampered when Mark Rosser jumped the grid ahead of him then hit the brakes as he tried to redress. Still, the Bathurst driver improved to sixth by the time he reached turn two.

A yellow flag was waved before he completed that opening lap - Rosser having made contact with the rear of James Koundouris' Audi - and after the safety car pulled off the track with a tick over 44 minutes left, Hobson increased the gap between them.

By the time the field had cycled through their compulsory pit stop, the #55 Kelso Electrical Audi had dropped back in the outright running to ninth. But most importantly, it was still second in class behind Hobson and that was good enough for Schumacher.

"Obviously Hobson got the good jump at the beginning and he was out of my sight, I got caught before the first pit stop behind [Stephen] Grove and [Jefri] Ibrahim, so it was no good to try and take two people there which let the front group get away from us," Schumacher said.

"From there our race was basically to obtain class position. When we came out after our pit stop we got caught behind [Marc] Cini and we made the call over the radio to just stick behind Cini, there was no need to make any bold move.

"But then Michael Bailey [class rival] was coming behind us, so I had to make the move on Cini. Once I made the move on Cini I knew I had to bridge a bit of a gap and that's where, at the end of the race on old tyres, I put down a 2:06.7.

"So super positive to get a 2:06 lap out of the car on the second last lap of the race on old tyres, it means with fresh rubber on I should be able to drop that quite a bit further again. So all in all, a good day for us."

The second race of the Bathurst round is set to start at 8:55am Friday morning.

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