Andre Heimgartner has flagged fitness as one of the areas he needs to improve ahead of his debut as a full-time V8 Supercars driver with Super Black Racing.

The 19-year old rookie contested the V8 Supercars Dunlop Series last year, but the development category’s 2014 races were significantly shorter than the main game runs.

“I’m all ready to do these 45-lap races, but the two hour races will test me so I need to work on my fitness a bit, be comfortable,” Heimgartner told v8supercars.com.au.

This week the Prodrive Racing (Australia) drivers – V8 Supercars, V8 Supercars Dunlop Series, and the Academy drivers – are completing an intensive training camp at the Millennium Institute in New Zealand, ahead of the season start and one of the most grueling events on the V8 Supercars calendar, the Clipsal 500.

And while Heimgartner believes it will be beneficial, “You can do all the training you want but driving the car is a different story!” he said.

After racing with SBR at the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 – where the wild card finished an impressive 11th – Heimgartner has experience in the new generation V8 Supercar, specifically a Prodrive-built Falcon.

“I’ve had a bit of a taste for it there and obviously we’ll be running that same sort of FG car for a few rounds, I think.

“So it was good to get a taste and it gave me a bit of confidence for myself to know we can mix it up with the other drivers, I’ve just got to take that forward.”

Heimgartner is realistic about his goals and expectations for the season ahead, knowing it can take time to generate results in a category that often saw a 25-car field separated by less than a second in qualifying in 2014.

“We as a team don’t have any big expectations – I personally expect to be struggling at the start of the season, it’s definitely a hard championship and I’m not underestimating the challenge at all,” Heimgartner said.

“I’m going out there with an open mind, to learn as much as I can.

“Say we end up somewhere around the top 15, I’ll be bloody over the moon – but if we end up last on the grid I’m not going to be stressing because I expected that to be the case.

“A lot of people have taken a few years to get going [before] they’ve started to get those top 15, top 10 places, so I can’t expect us to go straight in [and perform].”

With the pre-season sydney.com SuperTest spread over two days from February 6-7 this year, Heimgartner will have some valuable track time ahead of his racing debut.

“I’ll get the feel of how close I am, how fit from that day,” he said.

“A lot of testing needs to be done and I’ll get a lot of miles from that day so it’ll be great for me personally, being a rookie – over two days we’re bound to have at least one dry session … [if] you don’t have any dry sessions it’s pretty hard for a rookie to go straight it Clipsal.”

The crew on the #111 is expected to be those who worked on #18 last year – however Prodrive’s full engineering line-up is still to be determined this week. It is expected he will race the chassis driven by Jack Perkins last year.

Heimgartner – who has moved from the Gold Coast to Melbourne to be closer to the team – has spent time in the workshop for seat fittings and the like.

“The team seems very professional. I’ve been involved with a couple of teams and they are definitely one of the top ones … I think the team working on my car will be top-notch.”

It was announced last week that Super Black would take the place of the fourth car at Prodrive Racing, with Charlie Schwerkolt later confirming he and driver Lee Holdsworth would shift to Walkinshaw Racing for 2015.