THIS WEEK was supposed to be about looking forward to Winton Raceway’s fifth event of the 2021 Repco Supercars Championship calendar, which was due to offer plenty of storylines.
For starters there’s the fact that Brad Jones Racing has won just as many races at the Northern Victoria venue as Triple Eight has in the last decade.
Then there was the recent history of domination from Dick Johnson Racing – a team now firmly back in form after a series of strong results at The Bend last time out – and also of surprise results; witness Nissan’s success with Rick Kelly not that long ago.
What’s more, this weekend was supposed to see the debut of Dunlop’s new Super Soft control tyre which would add a new layer of both speed (early in the races) tyre management (in the middle of the races) and high degradation (at the end of the races) which would have the potential of offering up much excitement on a circuit known to be difficult on which to overtake.
Unfortunately, a harsh reminder to everyone that the Global Pandemic through which we are all existing continues to play a factor in our lives burst onto the scene.
Victoria, for the fourth time now, is back in lockdown and the Winton event has been postponed to a new date on the first weekend in August.
This is not the first time this has happened this year.
Earlier this year, the opening round of the Shannons Motorsport Australia Nationals Series – featuring TCR Australia, S5000, GT and more – was postponed several weeks after another brief Melbourne lockdown in February this year.
Soon thereafter, Supercars Tasmanian event was moved back one week on account of Brisbane battling through their own ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown in late March.
Both events were later successfully staged once lockdowns ended and states re-opened their borders to travel.
I’m sure Winton will be no different, though the nature of this latest Victorian outbreak seems somewhat more challenging than the earlier ones, which were dealt with via a three-day pause and then a resumption of life thereafter.
For a while, it also seemed like history was repeating as Victorian-based teams looked initially to skip the border and head North, in order to protect themselves from any issues getting into the Northern Territory for the 19-20 June event that is next up on the calendar.
However, it proved a moot point; borders were quickly shut and the Victorian teams had no real choice but to stay put this time – hoping that Melbourne, and as such the remainder of the country, opens up quicker than the 102-days they had to spend away in 2020.
You can debate the merits of continually locking down entire states for a handful of cases, frustrations at a botched vaccine rollout and the endless political rubbish sprouted as much as you like – everyone has an opinion on it.
Fortunately, and despite all of that, Supercars and indeed the broader sport in general have been flexible and entered into this season in full knowledge that the situation would be fluid at best, and completely unpredictable at worst.
And as much as the events of this week have proved challenging, there are still upsides.
The first is that the middle of the year has plenty of space to move when it comes to dates. Winton has a nearly three-week buffer before the trip to Darwin and after that there’s another fortnight clear before Townsville. There is some room to move.
After that there’s five full weekends with nothing scheduled, though at this point it looks like Winton will sit right in the middle of that gap in July / August.
Whether leaving that weekend open was by design, on the likely chance an early-season round would be compromised and need to be postponed, or just sheer fluke either way it is an excellent piece of timing.
Also, there’s still a full month before the next Shannons / ARG event which, should the lockdown only last its scheduled 7 days, will still give a full three weeks before those teams need to travel up to Queensland for the event at Morgan Park and two weeks for the Supercars teams to get to Hidden Valley.
What’s more, the lockdown could have come later – in the middle of the event, perhaps – as crowds had assembled and money had already been burned by cars getting on track.
This time there was no ‘Grand Prix scenario’ where things were stopped mid event. Racing Interruptus, if you will.
And finally, despite the fact the Victorian Government’s track record in managing their various Covid-19 outbreaks is less than stellar, after 14 months of living with this virus things like quarantining people en-masse, contact tracing, isolation and whatnot are better now than they were at the start, which means outbreaks are being dealt with quicker.
That has the spin-off of states having more confidence to open their borders faster and getting the wheels rolling much faster than they may have last year.
This isn’t the first major race affected by a Covid lockdown this year and you wouldn’t find long odds on it being the last.
But at least this time it’s easier to be more optimistic that, hopefully, the events of 2020 won’t be repeated.
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