11/28/2023 0 Comments Australian v8 supercars![]() Back in New Zealand, he and brothers Ross and Kevin designed and built their own Cuda Formula Atlantic car, which Ross drove to the New Zealand Gold Star championship in 1978. Jim Stone is a New Zealander who flew with all the other Kiwis to Europe, joined McLaren, and prepped winning Can-Am cars for Denny Hulme. “The culture of Ford and Holden here is huge.” What if some other automaker tried to enter? “We’re parallel to NASCAR in many ways, but if we let Toyota in, we’d be lynched,” dryly declared Jim Stone, a team co-owner and a figure in the series management. It is true you see Chryslers on track, Hemi-powered 300Cs, but you only see them as pace and safety cars, because they’re imports. Thus only Ford and the local GM brand, Holden, can participate. But a decade ago the series was restructured to exclude any but Australian-made cars with V8 engines-pushrod-V8 engines driving the rear wheels, at that. In the early years, champions drove Jaguar sedans, Ford Cortinas and Mustangs, Chevrolet Camaros, Mazdas, BMWs, Volvos and, for three years straight, Nissan Skylines. Nowadays the only eligible cars are indeed Australian. It also puts on a non-championship show accompanying Australia’s F1 Grand Prix. ![]() Today, under its present name, the V8 Supercar series runs 13 events in every state of the country plus New Zealand and, starting this year, Bahrain. In-country, the masses embraced the Australian Touring Car Championship as their own. What Aussies term touring car racing has a history dating back before 1960, but that was the year a solo, major event at Bathurst’s Mount Panorama circuit first determined a national championship.Ĭall it ironic, perhaps, that 1960 also was the year Sir Jack Brabham won his second F1 world title. “Single seaters don’t work here,” was one pit-lane comment we heard. Just as in America these days, sedans are the top racing dogs in Australia. So just what are these Supercars from Oz? Think NASCAR Way South. The crowd loves it.īTW, if you’ve heard about “inverted starts” for these Top 10, that’s been dropped. But then Supercars adds a Friday evening “Top Ten Shootout,” in which the 10 fastest drivers go out again, one at a time, to settle the front-third of the first grid with a single flying lap apiece. Qualifying is also part of the show, of course, and Champ Cars do that on both Friday and Saturday, whereas there’s only one such general session for the Supercars on Friday. Supercars puts on its first race Saturday and the second and third on Sunday, bracketing the “Champs.” That means the crowd’s last, lasting impression of their “Indy” weekend is of their beloved “V8s” roaring through the streets. Supercars: Three times 22 laps for 66 in all.įor points-scoring, each Supercar race counts separately, and the weekend package of three races is called a “round” of the 13-round series. Supercars had 30 on the starting grid of its first race and then raced twice more. Champ Car brought 18 drivers to Surfers, of whom 17 raced-once. And he went on to assert much the same about Formula One in Melbourne. ![]() Translated, he was asserting that the “Indy” race-they’re not bound down there to respect Tony George’s claim to the name-would never have lasted the 16 years it has on the Gold Coast without the Australian V8 Supercar Championship Series rolling into town to draw the real crowds. “Oi reckon the Chaamp Cahs ah good fun ‘n’ all, but thay’h the support-race to the Supacahs. “Nao, Mate,” one heavily-accented (to our ears) Aussie corrected us in a friendly but firm fashion. That’s before you hear how rapturously the locals cheer their own homegrown Supercars. Venture to Australia’s Surfers Paradise with the Champ Car Circus, as AutoWeek did recently, and your baggage may include some notion that the turbocharged open-wheelers from the north side of the globe are going to be the stars of the South Pacific streets.
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