![]() 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. We'll look at them on the next page.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. The Sydney Telstra 500 is the newest of the Australian V8 Supercar events.īut what about the Supercars themselves? We know that they have to be either Holden Commodore or Ford Falcon models, but what else does it take for a car to qualify as a V8 Supercar? There are some pretty strict rules. These include the Bathurst 1000, held every October on the Mount Panorama Circuit in Bathurst, New South Wales the Clipsal 500 held on the Adelaide Street Circuit in Adelaide in March the Phillip Island 500K held at the Phillip Island Grand Prix Circuit in Victoria in September and the Sydney Telstra 500 at Sydney's Olympic Park, which is the grand finale event of the season, held in December. There are several key events in the V8 Supercar Championship series. Future hosts of V8 Supercars are expected to be South Africa, India, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong and the U.S. Interest in the sport also began to spread and races began to be held in other countries, particularly in the Middle East. One of these, in 1999, was to change the name of the series to V8 Supercars. In 1997, the Australian Vee Eight Supercar Company (AVESCO) was created to run the series and find ways to expand its popularity. And, on the Touring Car circuit, they've gained quite a reputation as race cars. They're particularly popular as police cars and taxicabs, because of their durability and powerful engines. Why the Commodore and the Falcon? Part of the reason may be that these muscular 8-cylinder vehicles are the two most popular passenger cars in Australia. (Although the Falcon is made in the United States too, the version used in V8 Supercars is the Australian model.) Many different types of cars have won the Australian Touring Car Championship over the years, but in 1995 the rules were changed to specify that only two makes of cars were allowed: the Holden Commodore, a General Motors car made exclusively in Australia, and the Ford Falcon. The car he drove in the winning race was a Jaguar Mark I. ![]() The first was held on the Gnoo Blas circuit in Orange, New South Wales, and the winning driver was David McKay, who went on to become a racing journalist for the Australian Daily Telegraph. Until 1968, it was a single race, not a series. ![]() The history of V8 Supercars goes back to 1960, when it was known as the Australian Touring Car Championship.
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