GIVEN everything that has gone on this year, it feels wrong to even consider questioning the recent announcement of the four consecutive Supercars events at Sydney Motorsport Park.
Given the remarkably challenging conditions in which Australian Motorsport finds itself at present, that the championship has been able to engineer a way to get back on track deserves enormous praise.
And certainly, some elements of the four-round Sydney swing are exciting, including the return to 250km races at the final event, lots of night races, a solid mixture of tyre compounds and an overall point score and $25k prize for the driver who gets the most points from the four events.
They are all positives and should help in making sure that each of the four rounds will be feisty and unpredictable.
And yet for all the good, it’s hard to remove a nagging feeling from the back of my mind that the opportunity to truly do something innovative has slipped by.
The circuit is the first issue. Sydney Motorsport Park is a very good race track and it proved last year, when the right tyre compounds were applied, to make for very exciting racing on most occasions.
However, using the same 3.9km ‘Gardner GP’ layout for all four events seems like a bit of a misfire when there’s at least one other that could be used.
By the end of the four-round swing these drivers are going to have done more than 2,200km of the same circuit and while driving a racing car is incredible even that might be starting to wear thin – if not for the drivers, for the punters watching on TV.
Using the shorter loop, which cuts out turns five, six, seven and eight, may not produce better racing but it would at least be something different – different visuals, different racing and so on.
The short track wouldn’t induce the same level of tyre wear, but then again it would be a good opportunity to run the Ultra-Soft Dunlop tyre and switch up the formats. Plus, the rise up over the hill at what becomes Turn five is pretty spectacular and very fast. And different to the norm.
And then there’s the question of practice; namely, there’s too much of it.
There’s something like four hours of practice across the four events and that’s before you take qualifying into account.
Sure, there needs to be some time for a systems check at each event (remember the days of a 10 minute warmup?), and there needs to be an opportunity for co-drivers to get their eye in before Bathurst, but by the time the field rolls out for the fourth event in a row at the same circuit there is not a lot they are going to learn by completing more practice sessions.
Teams will always crave more running but in this instance, I can’t help but feel that it would have been a better outcome to ditch practice – which does not make for compelling TV at any place other than Bathurst – and send them straight into another qualy then a race.
These are professional teams and drivers and will be up to the job after four weeks at the same track, surely.
While the series has innovated with the timing of their races – one event features a Sunday night race, which will be particularly tasty when it comes to the TV audience potential – the fact three of the four rounds retain the same 3x125km format strikes of being a tad conservative as well.
I get the concerns around costs of adding pit stops to more races, and the pair of 250km races to be held on the fourth weekend are very welcome indeed, but there’s more way to run a sprint than what is in place.
While you don’t want them to have too big a swing – reverse grid races, for example, would be great but would interrupt the purity of the current championship battle – It’d have been nice to have seen some more experimentation, some more risks taken to mix things up and even trial things for the future.
Either way, the outcome of these four events is more than likely to be positive.
Just getting back on track will be fantastic and the TV schedule will be a ratings winner as the field heads towards the big one at Bathurst.
I just hope that by the fourth week of cars pounding around the same 3.9km of Sydney bitumen, we’re still feeling the same excitement as we are at week one.
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