THERE is a saying about failing to learn from history.
Then there’s the one that has to do with forgetting the history to begin with!
It’s a pertinent thought now given the current weighting of practice and qualifying versus racing at a range of Repco Supercars Championship rounds.
Remember about 20 years ago, the warm-up session on a Sunday morning, which was the norm at every round of the championship? No? Yes?
Well, it was boned.
A lot of people at the time said, ‘you can’t do that! This will be dangerous, we won’t be able to run cars, we can’t go straight into a race…’
There was all this hullabaloo about it and then you know what? Everyone has forgotten about it.
There’s still the warm-up sessions for the enduros, which I totally agree with, but taking away the warm-up sessions from all those other rounds, no one seems to have even raised that example in among all of the options, debate and social content I have read in recent weeks.
For the Sydney event next month, on the Friday afternoon, there’s a 90-minute practice session. It’s the only time Supercars are on track. It’s from 5pm local time to 6:30.
It gives drivers an idea of the sort of conditions that they’re going to be in for, for the Sunday night with the fading light. But a practice session on a Friday at five o’clock, that’s not for TV viewers, that’s not for race fans. People are at work, people are coming home from work, people are commuting. And at that time, the session won’t even be complete to even be considered for a run on the evening’s news bulletins, let alone get a run.
So we have got the cost of having the teams with all their gear, transportation, accommodation, being set up there for a Friday to run 90 minutes at the end of the day with what I would expect to be a small viewership watching on TV and probably not that many people at the track.
To me, that is a test day. That is, in essence, a non-retail day.
There’s no outcome, there’s no ‘congratulations, here’s a pole cheque at the end of it’, there’s no championship points, there’s no champagne, there’s no trophies.
Practice is akin to watching football training, if you’re an AFL fan or an NRL fan or a round-ball game fan, A-League, whatever you’re into. It’s equivalent to that.
I understand – this is important – that it costs money for every kilometre that a Supercar turns on a track, whether it’s a test day, practice session, qualifying or a race.
However, by my reckoning, if you take the track time in a weekend for a Supercar round, say for Sydney, it has just got to be sliced differently: less practice. We need to go and get the pruning shears out a little bit.
This is a racing championship, not a practicing championship. Give them a brief practice session to roll cars out and get them going – and then let’s move into on-track running with outcomes that matter to the fans and TV viewers.
So what about qualifying? Having different qualifying sessions for each race mixes up the orders, some say. But does it? The very nature of qualifying in motorsport generally puts the fastest cars on the day at the front of the grid – and then we moan about a lack of overtaking!
Do we need to look at some progressive grid rounds? Or is it a case of two sprints on Saturday, combine the results, there’s your grid on Sunday?
My personal feeling is we have got to find a way to get away from having qualifying over and over and over again.
Let’s use the track time available in a weekend, for the running costs where they sit at the moment and the number of minutes of sessions whether it’s races, qualifying, practices or shootouts, let’s have more stuff on a track at a race weekend that really matters.
If you prune the practice back, then you don’t need to be there an extra day. Give the teams an extra test day or two instead. Those costs are far more contained. They’re not travelling interstate; you’re not having to fly people to wherever you’re testing.
When the cars are on the track at a racetrack on a race weekend, they should be doing more racing than anything else.
Do the things that have a result, that have an outcome, that really matter.
And the little reminder about cutting the warm-up sessions – the world didn’t stop spinning, everything kept continuing.
It can be done.
