EVERY COUPLE of years a story will pop up in the local motorsport media quoting someone of significance or otherwise about a potential extension to Symmons Plains’ 2.41km layout.
The Tasmanian circuit is the home of the third event on the 2019 Supercars calendar this weekend and I’ve no doubt someone will bring it up again at some point across the weekend – if there’s time among chat about parity, ballast, centre-of-gravity and other more pressing issues.
However to change Symmons Plains would be tantamount to a crime.
It’d be like changing the top of Mount Panorama or adding a chicane at Phillip Island.
Perhaps a more appropriate analogy would be that it would be like adding another 500 meters to Bristol Motor Speedway, the half-mile NASCAR oval that it is at the very core of US short-track racing.
The old-school ‘Bullrings’ are as much a part of that sport as the Superspeedways like Daytona.
Symmons Plains is Supercars’ Bristol: an old school short track where fans can see everything from their vantage point on the hill and where a narrow layout, high speeds and plenty of trepidation make for exciting, unpredictable racing.
Symmons is a terrific track with as iconic a corner as they come: the awesome, 180-degree hairpin at the end of the back straight. It’s one of the great corners, both for overtaking and for setting up passes that occur further around the lap at turn six, the last main corner on the circuit.
The hairpin is a great place to watch racing. Spectators are only a few feet away, elevated above the action. The cars emerge from turn three, bursting out under the bridge as they rattle the outside wall with their left hand mirrors. Then there’s the braking duels into the corner itself and the more than one occasion that someone misses the mark and ends up beached in what must surely be the deepest gravel trap on the calendar.
Supercars’ needs Symmons in the same way that it needs places like Adelaide to host a street event and Phillip Island to put on a show on the fastest track in the country.
It’s a different style of track in a diverse calendar and making the circuit longer or changing such an iconic layout – one that has been the same for most of the 47 ATCC / Supercars events the circuit has held – would take away from it’s uniqueness.
I hope they don’t ever touch it.
The annual trip to Tassie brings with it plenty of questions; those surrounding parity and centre-of-gravity chief among them.
The Ford Mustang copping a rumoured 30-kilogram whack of Ballast above its midriff couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Blue Oval because this weekend they head into what can be considered enemy territory.
The motorsport gods being the cruel, irony-filled mistresses that they are, have set up another storyline because there’s a very good chance that the Mustang will be defeated for the first time this weekend – the week after they copped the brunt of the technical changes designed to improve the categories parity.
The irony in this story is that Symmons Plains has been Holden territory for years and to be frank, the blue oval has been routed there in the last decade; good parity or otherwise.
Drivers piloting GM products have won 18 of the last 21 races held there since 2010 – 14 of those cars run by Triple Eight Race Engineering.
While Fabian Coulthard grabbed a win there for Shell V-Power Racing in 2017, Ford’s most recent win prior to that was all the way back in 2012, courtesy of Will Davison.
Even the last non Triple Eight car to win at Symmons was still a car built by them: Will Davison won for Tekno there in 2016.
So here’s how Tasmania is likely to play out.
Triple Eight will dominate at a circuit where they almost always dominate once again.
This will prompt Ford teams to complain that the C-O-G changes to their car was too severe and hurt their performance, despite the brand only winning at Symmons Plains three times in a decade of racing.
Alternatively, Mustang’s will sweep the weekend in the same emphatic way they did in Adelaide and Melbourne, pressing Holden teams further into the parity debate than they already are as they ready for Phillip Island the week after.
A track, by the way, Scott McLaughlin has made his own in recent years and where many expect the Mustang’s aero stylings to be particularly impressive.
And the wheel goes round…
Either way, it’s great fodder for TV and news websites – and may just keep any thoughts of changing the wonderful little bullring that is Symmons Plains out of people’s minds for another year yet.
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