Organisers behind Porsche Carrera Cup Australia are in discussions with their colleagues in Asia about future joint events, which could lead to an Asia Pacific championship in future years.
Porsche runs Carrera Cup competitions in Australia, Japan, and a regional Asian competition, utilising the same technical platform across the three.
That’s resulted in Carrera Cup Australia and Asia sharing track time at Sydney Motorsport Park last year, the third such hook up in recent seasons.
Carrera Cup Asia has twice this year shared the bill with its Japanese counterparts, firstly with joint races at Suzuka before taking part in a Porsche Festival at Fuji in June.
According to Carrera Cup Australia category manager Troy Bundy, the three series are keen to host more joint events.
“We’d love to do something like that,” Bundy told Speedcafe.com.
“I think it’s something we’d all be excited to do; to put all three Carrera Cup programs together in the Asia Pacific region, but obviously it’s quite a big logistical program to put together and it’s all got to work.
“We’ve obviously already run with Carrera Cup Asia three times now,” he added.
“Also we’d like to include our colleagues in Carrera Cup Japan as well to be part of what we sort of call an Asia Pacific championship.
“That would be a really cool concept that we’d love to work on.”
The concept had initially been tabled for next year, though the complications raised by Japan hosting the Olympics put paid to that.
Instead it’s now being discussed ahead of a possible introduction for 2021, with Carrera Cup Australia set to race exclusively within Australia again next year.
“At this stage of the game we probably don’t have plans to go to Asia (in 2020),” Bundy said.
“We were talking to both Carrera Cup Asia and Japan about potentially doing something together but unfortunately the stars didn’t align for next year simply because of the challenges with the Olympics.
“That made a lot of our plans quite difficult, so we decided to put it on hold for now.
“All of us are doing our own programs in 2020 and then we’ll keep the discussion going and see if we can realign for 2021 or beyond.”
The 2020 calendar is still being finalised, with discussions ongoing with a number of promoters to lock down the final details.
However, Bundy says he expects it to resemble that used in 2018.
In 2018 the Carrera Cup Australia season started in Adelaide before venturing to the Grand Prix, with the only notable difference being Townsville replacing Sydney Motorsport Park for 2019.
Phillip Island is also set to be dropped entirely as Supercars doesn’t visit the Victorian venue next season.
“We are committed to the Australian Grand Prix, we’ve got an existing agreement in place, so we’re definitely going back to the Australian Grand Prix,” Bundy said.
“It’s pretty simple because that’s a marquee event for us and a great platform for us.
“We’ll continue to align Carrera Cup with the Supercar program,” he added.
“It makes sense for us, they’ve got a fantastic range of events, some of the biggest events in the country for motorsport, great TV packages, big crowds, and our customers love racing there.
“What they’ve (Supercars) offered us so far we’ve very happy with; it’s probably very similar to what we had last year with a few tweaks.”
Porsche Carrera Cup Australia is next in action as part of the supporting cast to the Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000, the penultimate round of the 2019 season.
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