Dunlop Super2 Series team owners have hailed the move to hold longer races, from next week’s Perth round.
Super2’s standard event format had been a pair of 30-minute races, converted to a prescribed lap count, and the loss of genuinely competitive action due to a combination of Safety Cars and time-certainty had long been a sore point among competitors.
Now, in a change which will apply everywhere except Bathurst, which retains 100km races, those encounters will be a wholly time-certain 40 minutes in length.
Image Racing owner Terry Wyhoon told Speedcafe, “Whether it’s time or laps, I don’t care how they put it, but 10 minutes extra could be 10 extra laps at somewhere like Perth, so extending it is great.
“People might think twice about some desperado moves on Lap 1 now that they think, ’40 minutes; I could leave this until Lap 2 at least,’” he quipped.”
Fellow Super2 stalwart Amin Chahda had a similar take.
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a good idea, because at the end of the day, we go out there, no matter what happens, we know we’ve got 40 minutes,” the Matt Chahda Motorsport boss told Speedcafe.
“You’re not going, ‘Are they going to cut this down? How many laps? We don’t know how long we’ve got to go’; you’re halfway through a race and you don’t know what’s going to happen [under the old format]. Now you know that it’s 40 minutes.
“It’s a lot better. Even if you get half of it in Safety Cars, you’re still going to get a few laps.”
The Blanchard Racing Team operates in both the Repco Supercars Championship and Super2, having expanded into the latter this year.
Co-Principal Tim Blanchard pointed to not only driver development benefits, but also commercial.
“I think it’s positive,” he told Speedcafe.
“There are two aspects to it. From a commercial point of view, you need more track time and TV time and racing laps.
“We’ve got Petronas on our Super2 car this year and we did a handful of racing laps in Newcastle, and it’s very hard to justify to our partners when we do a handful of racing laps [for] the whole weekend.
“The commercial reality is that the cost of running that car is still quite high – it’s not a cheap car to run – so the exposure and return needs to be reasonably high for the people paying for it.
“From a driving perspective, we’re trying to bring these guys up to race in main series or the endurance races at the very least, and it’s very hard to teach a young kid how to manage his tyres and the stint, and improve his racecraft, when you only do three or four laps of racing.
“They need to be doing 20 laps of racing in a race to learn about tyre management and all of those important things.”
Anderson Motorsport’s Zak Best leads the Super2 Series while Image/Erebus Academy driver Jobe Stewart is on top in the Super3 class after Round 1 in Newcastle.
Round 2 supports the Bosch Power Tools Perth SuperSprint at Wanneroo Raceway from Friday week (April 28).
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