Supercars releases tweaked Perth schedule

Saturday’s Race 9 and Sunday’s Race 10 of the season are now officially slated to get underway at 15:45 local time/17:45 AEST, 20 minutes earlier than scheduled per the original Supplementary Regulations.

As before, they will each be 55 laps around Wanneroo Raceway, equating to 133km of racing on each afternoon, which will be held in a primetime television slot for the east coast.

The event’s two qualifying sessions have similarly been brought forward to 12:20 local time/14:20 AWST, and likewise the Saturday and Sunday practice sessions have shifted by 20 minutes.

Friday’s practice session remains an hour long, commencing at 14:20 local time/16:20 AEST.

Those tweaks to the Saturday and Sunday programme represent the second change to the Perth SuperSprint schedule after Supercars moved last month to update the practice format for a further three events.

The single, 90-minute practice format was set to be expanded from Wanneroo last year to several other events, including this month’s at Taupo.

However, it has now been split into 60 minutes on Friday and 20 minutes on each of Saturday and Sunday – representing an extra 10 minutes in net terms – at Wanneroo and Symmons Plains, to give fans more Supercars action on the key days of the event.

At the Sandown 500, the two, 40-minute sessions on the Friday have been converted to a trio of 30-minute hit-outs, with one for primary drivers only, one for co-drivers only, and the other open to all drivers.

The 90-minute practice session at Hidden Valley had already been broken up into 60 minutes on Friday and 30 minutes on Saturday to facilitate the move of a qualifying session to Friday.

While the stated reason was to give fans a meaningful Friday session, the change also avoided the problem of trying to determine a Darwin Triple Crown winner at an event with two races and two Top 10 Shootouts.

The Perth SuperSprint takes place on May 17-19.

Supercars Perth SuperSprint schedule Revised

All times AWST/UTC +8