Cessnock City Council has confirmed that it has been exploring potential Supercars tracks as it pushes to replace the Newcastle 500 in 2025.
The 2024 Newcastle 500 was called off in October, at which point Cessnock Mayor Jay Suvaal threw his council area’s hat in the ring as an alternative.
Since then, Newcastle City Council has voted to essentially kill off its event for the foreseeable future, by pushing ahead with reconstruction of permanent roundabouts and raised pedestrian crossings on the street circuit route.
In the meantime, though, Cessnock has been making moves in a bid to turn its surprise vision for a ‘Wine Country 500’ into reality.
A spokesperson for council has since advised Speedcafe that it has been undertaking “some preliminary groundwork on potential track options, which has been shared with Supercars.”
No further details are known at this stage, but the revelations are indicative that Cessnock is serious about bringing the category back to the Hunter Valley.
The Newcastle 500 debuted on the Supercars calendar in 2017, replacing Sydney Olympic Park as the season finale, and spent three seasons in that position before a three-year absence due to COVID restrictions.
By the time the 2022 event was postponed amid the Omicron outbreak, and ultimately not rescheduled, it had moved to the season-opener position in what turned out to be a direct swap with the Adelaide 500.
Notably, at least two senior Cessnock council staff were “involved in planning” the Newcastle East Street Circuit, reported the Newcastle Herald in October.
Should planning on the Wine Country 500 progress to a sufficiently advanced stage, then it is likely that iEDM would be brought in (assuming it has not been already), given it works on all of Supercars’ current street circuits.
Back in October, Cr Suvaal had floated anything from a track created from Cessnock Airport’s runways and taxiways to a permanent circuit on former mining land or a street circuit.
A permanent circuit is a virtual impossibility by 2025, with no serious signs that any party is/has been pursuing such an initiative, and ongoing construction of the nearby Circuit Italia facility would presumably detract from the business case anyway.
While there have been multiple airport-based race tracks in the United States, Cessnock’s looks less feasible.
Although the runway is just over one kilometre long (1097 metres, according to official documents) and 30 metres wide, with a parallel taxiway of 7.5 to eight metres wide, there appears little in the way of suitable surrounding streets to which it could be linked in order to form a circuit, unlike, say, the St Petersburg IndyCar track.
Presumably, then, that leaves just ‘conventional’ street circuit options, which raises any number of possibilities.
Given council itself has adopted the ‘Wine Country 500’ moniker, then it would seem desirable that vineyard(s) form the backdrop to any circuit.
The Newcastle East Street Circuit, for example, was arguably a tremendous showcase for the city’s location, although the Townsville 500 has been a success despite the Reid Park Street Circuit being largely removed from local landmarks.
In terms of a business case, Cessnock could count on a very similar catchment to Newcastle.
Indeed, Newcastle councillor Elizabeth Adamczyk, who voted to essentially seal the Newcastle 500’s fate on Tuesday night, noted a Wine Country 500 would be “very accessible” for constituents which she represents in the city’s western suburbs, who were found in community consultation to be Supercars’ biggest supporters in that local government area.
New South Wales Premier Chris Minns and tourism minister John Graham threw their support behind the Newcastle 500 in recent months, although neither the state government nor Supercars are yet to announce any position on the mooted Cessnock event.
DNSW will, however, support next February’s Bathurst SuperFest, which is bookended by the Repco Bathurst 12 Hour and the Thrifty Bathurst 500 which has been created as the replacement Supercars season-opener for 2024.
The last Newcastle 500 drew its biggest crowd since the inaugural event in 2017, and there have been 200,000-plus attendances at each of the final three events of the season, all of which unfolded on street circuits.
The Bathurst 1000 recorded its third-highest four-day attendance, the Gold Coast 500 set a new record for its Supercars-only era (which dates back to 2009), and the Adelaide 500 saw a small uplift on last year’s comeback event, to more than 260,000 people over four days.
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