This month’s Ned Whisky Tasmania SuperSprint will feature a tweak to the Saturday knockout qualifying session.

Under a minor revision to the schedule, the third segment of Qualifying for Race 10 of the Repco Supercars Championship is now 10 minutes long, with the others being 15 minutes each.

Previously, all three were a quarter of an hour in duration, matching the supplementary regulations for the previous event of the season, the Bosch Power Tools Perth SuperSprint.

Then at Wanneroo, the third segment of qualifying was very quiet, to the point where cars rolled out in circumstances similar to that of a Top 10 Shootout, and similar might reasonably be expected at Tasmania’s Symmons Plains given it too is a 2.4km circuit.

Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Shane van Gisbergen said on the subject, “I feel like it could be a little better.

“There’s so much dead time. Maybe it needs to be 15-12-10, or even eight minutes for the last one; didn’t need 15 for it.

“We didn’t have the tyres to make the most of it.”

Grove Racing’s David Reynolds agreed, saying, “15 minutes at the end with 10 cars is too long.

“If they gave us endless sets of tyres, you’d see heaps of people flogging around, but we only had three sets.”

Like Wanneroo, each driver will have seven sets of tyres at their disposal at the start of the weekend including the two sets to hand back prior to qualifying and racing.

That leaves five sets for a three-part qualifying session, when most will use one set per part, and one new seat each for the rapid-fire Sunday morning sessions.

As was also the case at Wanneroo, the three races will each be 42 laps or 100km long.

Practice for the support categories takes place on Friday, May 19, with the Supercars Championship field hitting the track from the following day.

Tasmania Supercars schedule

All times local/AEST/UTC+10