OUTSIDE the well-promoted return of night racing to the Supercars Championship, interest at the Red Rooster Sydney SuperNight 300 will go beyond the Supercars stars doing it in the dark for the first time since 2011.
As cool as night racing will be, the lack of practice time built in to the abbreviated schedule for the brand-new, two-day event is likely to be very closely analysed by those in Supercars HQ and across pit lane.
This year Supercars’ SuperSprint rounds have all featured at least 130 minutes of practice, comprised of two, 45-minute sessions on Friday and then either 2, 20-minute sessions (one each Saturday and Sunday) or another 45-minute run Saturday morning.
However, this weekend the Sydney event has just two, 30-minute blasts for teams to dial their cars in before qualifying.
One of those is run on Friday night and will be the first time that the field runs under the temporary lights currently being erected in Sydney’s West.
It’s a full 55 per cent reduction in track time prior to Qualifying compared to a usual event and that is significant; especially given Sydney Motorsport Park’s penchant for high tyre degradation thanks to its numerous long, loaded and flowing corners.
It means there’s a good chance some teams may not yet be ‘in the window’ by the time racing starts.
Ironically, a lot of observers think that could be the best thing to happen for a long time.
Practice is a hot topic amongst the Supercars fraternity for a host of different reasons.
In most instances, Friday’s pair of 45-minute sessions feel relatively meaningless, with the series’ tyre restrictions generally limiting teams to run older, previously-used rubber across the first day of each event.
In a nutshell, Fridays become long, drawn out days of not much really happening that tend not to be particularly impactful – at least to the broader audience – on the remainder of the weekend.
Recent proposals have been floated to permit teams to purchase another brand-new set of Dunlop’s for Friday, allowing new-tyre pace to be assessed and therefore giving much more meaning to the term ‘practice’.
This, though, will be hotly debated on the basis that it will add cost that many teams are desperate to avoid spending.
The F1-style ‘knockout’ qualifying system that debuted earlier this year in Tasmania and Barbagello partly fixed the problem, by ensuring the Friday results were reflected in advancement through qualifying the following day. It was generally reflected as a positive step in the right direction.
Yet the fact remained that for much of the 90-minutes of running on Friday cars pounded around on mostly junk tyres without doing a great deal.
It does not make compelling viewing for those watching on TV nor those at the circuit and you could argue it does little to add to ‘The Show’, save for the cars running for the sake of it and for the few thousand that turn up on Fridays.
Hence the interest in the Sydney format.
Instead of 135 minutes of pounding around, just 60 will be on offer in two 30-minute sessions.
With Sydney Motorsport Park’s intricacies and the critical nature of the event this weekend – remember, there’s 300 points up for grabs in just the one race – it should make for much more intense practice action.
Suddenly both sessions will be charged with a shot of adrenaline and like a big night out on the town, could turn out to be supremely impactful on your Saturday night performance later in the evening.
Imagine you’re Shane van Gisbergen and – though it seems unfathomable – you miss the boat in practice. As a result, you qualify poorly. You then get turned around in turn one as everyone works out how to race in the dark and end up a non-finisher. To make matters worse, DJR Team Penske nails it and Scott McLaughlin wins.
Suddenly, your 131-point championship deficit becomes 431 and things are looking dire heading towards the enduros.
Nailing practice just got real, didn’t it?
Less practice means more intensity in the sessions that remain and a potentially bigger chance for results to change because of that.
Spread this out across the five or six ‘SuperSprint’ format events and you would save more than six hours of running, reducing costs.
It could then keep Friday’s for the support categories and media activations, hot laps and TV filming and condense the smaller events into two-day propositions, making each session so much more valuable and meaningful and even possibly removing a day out of the travel schedule for many people.
And if teams complain that they’re lacking track time, the nearly full days’ worth of track time they would save at race meetings could be added back into the testing allocation, which at three days is almost currently non-existent.
Either way, the great experiment this weekend in Sydney may mean more than just going racing under lights – it could also be the shake up the race weekend format at other events so desperately needs.
We’ll be watching closely.
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