Eleven cars will line-up for the four 30-minute races this weekend at the Shannons SpeedSeries, and three will be streamed live and free on 7plus, with race three to also be on free-to-air television on 7mate.

“Racing so early in the year certainly poses a number of challenges for our APC community, with a number of our competitors still completing rebuilds and refreshes of their race cars, which has also been impacted by the global shipping issues affecting everyone at the moment,” said Troy Williams, the General Manager of APC category manager, Production Car Racing Ltd.

“It does leave our Sandown racers in a prime position to get an early points advantage for their APC season, and we expect to see some exciting racing both outright and across the classes this weekend.”

Reigning outright and Class X title holder Iain Sherrin wants another in his BMW M4. His brother Grant, last year’s class runner-up, will be out to beat him in the identical, albeit newer M4.

Other opposition includes Dean Campbell and Cameron Crick in their new BMW M2. They came close to the Class A1 title last year in their Mitsubishi EVO X which had a heavy crash at the finale. Also in that fight will be Bathurst 6 Hour winners Simon Hodges and Jayden Ojeda in another M4.

In Class A1 Chris Sutton can count as an outright contender, particularly if its wet, in his Evo X, and Paul Buccini will be in his BMW M140i. Chris Lillis and Nathan Callaghan will bring their potential outright contender A2 Chev Camaro and will be joined by Matt Holt (HSV Clubsport) who hopes for a better outing than his last Sandown trip which resulted in a heavy crash.

In Class B2, Ben Gersekowski will be in BMW M3, Allan Jarvis is aboard his VW Polo GTi in Class C, and David Bailey returns to the championship with Matt Thewlis in the D Class Mini Cooper S R56.

“Across the board last year, Australian Production Cars consistently fielded the largest grids of the Shannons SpeedSeries events, even when you factor out the GT4 racers that shared the grid with us, and we expect that to still be the case in 2024 once we get past this earlier than usual start and we have our regulars coming back online,” Williams added.