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Supercars will again headline the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix when the championship reaches Melbourne next April.
The event will be the third round of the 2022 F1 campaign, which gets underway in Bahrain before a stop in Saudi Arabia en route to Victoria.
While not yet signed and sealed, Australian Grand Prix Corporation boss Andrew Westacott expects the Aussie tintop competition to appear as the leading undercard category.
“Supercars will headline our support programme,” Westacott confirmed to Speedcafe.com.
“We’ve got to work through the detail because the one thing that will exist is, being April, is sunset is about an hour-and-a-half earlier than what it would normally be with daylight savings.”
Next year’s event takes place roughly a month later than the traditional Australian GP date.
It’s also a week after daylight savings ends, with sunset at 18:01 AEST on race day next April – that contrasts to a 19:45 AEDT sunset for a March 12 event.
The impact of that is a reduced period in which to squeeze in track activity, with Formula 1, Supercars, and a bevy of other categories and activities set to take place.
“We’re going to have to reconfigure race timings, and so on,” Westacott noted.
“It’ll mean an earlier Formula 1 race time and will also mean different timings for the support categories.”
Alongside Supercars, Porsche Carrera Cup Australia has been a regular on the Australian GP support bill, while Australian GT has also been present in recent years.
In 2020, the Supercheap Auto TCR Series and S5000 were slated to compete, and like Supercars took to the Albert Park circuit before the event was cancelled on Friday morning.
