Supercars will not hold any two-day events in 2024, after dissatisfaction over how they were rolled out this year.
Three of this year’s SuperSprints were two-day events so far as Repco Supercars Championship track activity was concerned.
However, teams still had to send crew members to the circuit on Thursdays to complete the bulk of their set-up because they were not allowed access to pit lane or to lower transporter tailgates on Fridays due to support categories being on-track.
Speedcafe understands that there will be no such anomalies next year, with the Supercars Championship field to always be on-track on a Friday.
An upshot is that at Sydney Motorsport Park, which was one of the infamous ‘two-day meetings’ of the 2023 season, there is likely to be a practice session under lights on the Friday night.
The move to three days of track activity at all (non-Australian Grand Prix) SuperSprint events is therefore likely to receive a mixed reaction.
One school of thought is that Supercars should have devised a schedule and a set of procedures such that crews could arrive at a track on Friday to set up for a genuine two-day event.
There is hence likely to be an ongoing push for the matter to be revisited for the 2025 season, given the costs and additional burden on crews of still having to travel to the track on a Thursday.
There also exists a line of argument that two-day events, regardless of the specifics about when/how teams set up, represent a better value proposition for spectators because the Supercars action is packed into the days of the week – ie Saturday and Sunday – when most fans are able to attend.
Triple Eight Race Engineering Team Principal Jamie Whincup said in Sydney this year, “In my opinion, we’ve got an operational issue this weekend.
“You can’t use pit lane because all the support categories are in there, and you can’t pull your tailgate down because there’s an OH&S issue.
“So, we’ve all got to roll in [on Thursday], you’ve got a half a day and a mad rush to get everything out of your truck in the garage, and then get your pit boom set up.
“Then we sit around here [on Friday] with your finger up your bum, waiting to get on.
“So, if we’re here, we may as well be racing, but let’s fix the operational issue.
“Let’s set up [on Friday] and then have a crack at Saturday, Sunday.”
Dick Johnson Racing Team Principal Ben Croke reasoned that there should have been a night-time practice session before the field raced under lights, for the first time in the Gen3 era, on the following night.
While Symmons Plains and The Bend were also ‘two-day events’, Sydney was the most anomalous of them all because of the night race and the ride day which followed on the Monday, meaning some crew members were at the track for five days all up.
There has been at least one voice who expressed a defence for three-day events, namely Grove Racing owner Stephen Grove, on the basis that fans are not seeing enough Supercars as it is.
“There’s commercial reasons why it’s done but my preference is three days,” he stated in Sydney.
“But that’s always been my preference, because my preference also is that we don’t have enough rounds.
“We race 12 times a year; it’s just not enough from a commercial perspective.”
As is the case this year, however, next year’s calendar also spans just the bare 12 events to meet the television contract.
Thus far, finer details of formats for 2024 have not been announced although, in a further change to SuperSprints (except for Albert Park), they will be comprised of a pair of timed 60-minute races rather than three races with prescribed lap counts.
The 2023 Supercars season concludes later this month at the Vailo Adelaide 500, where practice for the headline act starts on the afternoon of Thursday, November 23.
