MOTORSPORT: Bathurst dropped from Supercars calendar

The 2020 Supercars championship will actually finish in 2020.

Races scheduled for New Zealand and Bathurst’s Mount Panorama in early 2021 have been dumped from the calendar first revised in May as a response to the three-month pause prompted by COVID-19.

The Bend circuit in South Australia has also been dropped from the calendar and replaced in its September slot by the Sandown circuit in Melbourne.

The championship will now conclude under Sydney Motorsport Park’s new $16.4 million lighting system in December, taking over Sandown’s old slot.

All this means SMP gets two championship events in 2020, as it will re-start the championship on June 27-28 as well.

It also means Holden’s time as an official entrant in Australian touring car racing will come to an end in December in Sydney rather than at Bathurst in February.

For now the rest of the calendar remains unchanged, but Supercars has reserved the right to make more calendar changes depending on COVID-19 restrictions imposed by government.

“When the draft calendar was released four weeks ago, our primary objective was to ensure we returned to racing as soon as possible,” Supercars CEO Sean Seamer said in a press statement.

“This allowed us to put a stake in the ground and ensure we returned to the track quickly following the COVID-19 shutdown.

“The calendar announced in May was based on the best information we had at the time.

“With an eye on 2021, teams and broadcast partners have agreed it is in all parties’ best interests commercially and competitively to finish this year’s campaign in December and start the new season in the New Year.”

Translated into layman terms, the challenge for teams, sponsors and broadcasters of trying to resolved the contractual challenges of staging 2020 championship races in 2021 just got too hard.

Discarding The Bend seems another matter entirely. Officially, its abandonment has been lumped in with the 2021 events and blamed on COVID-19.

"Supercars owe a big apology to South Australia, and the many South Australian businesses and tourism operators that rely on event goers for their livelihoods, particularly at a time when their business has already been devastated by COVID restrictions," said The Bend managing director Sam Shahin in a press release today.

Separately it was clarified to carsales that The Bend was willing to be flexible on race formats and was not insisting it run a 500km endurance race as listed in the original 2020 Supercars calendar.

The owners of the shining new venue, the Shahin family, have been promised a place on the 2021 Supercars calendar that is scheduled for announcement in October. That’s unlikely to be cheering them up.

New Zealand, as well as the Gold Coast and Newcastle street races already canned for 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic, have also been promised slots on the calendar in 2021.

The rescheduled 2020 calendar now looks like this:

• Superloop Adelaide 500 – February 20-23
• Beaurepaires Supercars Melbourne 400 – March 12-15
• BP Ultimate Sydney SuperSprint – June 27-28
• Truck Assist Winton – July 18-19
• BetEasy Darwin Triple Crown – August 8-9
• Townsville – August 29-30
• Penrite Oil Sandown – September 19-20
• Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 – October 8-11
• PIRTEK Perth – October 31-November 1
• Tyrepower Tasmania – November 21-22
• Sydney Motorsport Park – December 12-13