Several regular Australian Motor Racing Series (AMRS) categories will still race this weekend at The Bend at what will now be the inaugural round of the ‘South Australian Motorsport Series’.
AMRS’s second round of 2022 was to have been held at the South Australian venue on April 22-24 but that has now been moved to Winton, per an announcement from management of that series on Good Friday.
However, the Promaxx Performance Exhausts TA2 Muscle Car Series is sticking with The Bend, as is the MARC Cars Australia Championship and Australian Formula 3 Championship.
The card will also include the SA GT Challenge and potentially a round of SA Tin Tops, pending numbers which are said to be promising at this point in time.
The event will be promoted by The Bend itself, and has been put on to service the categories whose competitors had already booked accommodation and organised travel.
However, the South Australian Motorsport Series is set to be an ongoing feature at the circuit according to The Bend’s operations manager, Wayne Williams, having been in the works for some time.
“I was looking forward to these categories coming here with AMRS,” Williams told Speedcafe.com.
“We always look for those national categories to come, and we were disappointed when AMRS wasn’t going to come here, but very happy when all the categories came to us and said, ‘We still want to run here.’
“For us, it was a last-minute [matter of] ‘try to get a race meeting together’, but it was worth it, and will be worth it, because it’ll be a great event.”
The South Australian Motorsport Series will be run to Motorsport Australia sanctioning, whereas AMRS rounds are sanctioned by the Australian Auto-Sport Alliance (AASA).
AMRS, AASA, and Winton Motor Raceway in Benalla are all owned by the Benalla Auto Club, as is Goulburn’s Wakefield Park Raceway.