It’s not been the start to the year Supercars Australia would have hoped for – or even anticipated, for that matter.
The demise – only just a few months ago – of the Newcastle street circuit round threw the proverbial spanner in the works at the last minute, leaving the 2024 calendar unconfirmed right up until the end of October.
Not that the Newcastle news came out of the blue. There has been strong and growing opposition to the event among some Novocastrians, and in particular the inner-city residents whose front doors are a metre or two away from the edge of the racetrack. In hindsight, it’s hard to see how staging a street circuit motor race so close to homes that they become uninhabitable for weeks on end could be a positive outcome, or even tenable for that matter. What had been hailed as a spectacular replacement for the defunct Sydney Olympic Park street circuit, a kind of Monaco, NSW Central Coast style, with stunning cityscape and ocean backdrop, is gone after just four years. Hopefully lessons have been learned from this debacle.
Newcastle’s cancellation left Supercars with few options. The contract it had with the NSW state government’s Destination NSW tourism department stipulated that the opening round had to be held in NSW (a bit like the contract the NSW government had with the A-League to host the soccer grand final in Sydney – but which was later dissolved after both parties came under a barrage of criticism from outraged fans from other States).
So it wasn’t as though they could simply
