The 2020 Bathurst 1000 is the 60th running of the event if you also include the 500 mile races at Philip Island and the times when a race was also run to Super Touring rules as well as a 5L race. The 2020 edition is also as far as I can tell, the race which has the fewest number of starters but this absolutely nothing to do with the Coronavirus pandemic which has come and changed everything. No, this has to do with the nature of the series now being a closed shop and deliberately excluding privateers' dreams.
The Great Race is not really that great any more and the current management caused it to be.
The race has been through a number of rules iterations, ranging from purely production cars, to Group C, Group A and now two distinct generations of Group 3A 5L cars which have been branded as V8Supercars and finally just Supercars. The current rules set has its origins in a marketing fight in 1991 when both Ford and Holden decided to threaten to leave touring car racing in Australia in favour of the then Auscar series, and the motorsports confederation caved into their demands. Admittedly, only Holden in Australia actually bothered to build cars for touring car racing here, as Ford was ambivalent and quite happy for competitors to run a turbo hatchback car which came from Belgium. What really got their hackles up was when Nissan built their GTR Skyline and made everyone in every Group A series look stupid. Ford and Holden weren't having that and decided to design their own regulations.
What they came up with was a set of regulations which nobody else could play with. The Supercars series was framed around four door cars with 5L V8 engines; which only Ford and Holden built. They eventually relaxed the regulations to allow other manufacturers to build frankenstein cars with engines which didn't originally come with the cars but in December 2013, the then Treasurer Joe Hockey thundered from the floor of parliament that the government was threatening to remove the subsidy payments the motor manufacturers in Australia and dared them to leave. By the end of the week, all three manufacturers in Australia made their announcements that they were going to do precisely that.
The frankenstein Nissans, Volvos, and Mercedes-Benz, came and went; Holden stopped building the VF Commodore and the ZB Commodore which replaced it became even more of a frankenstein machine and then Opel which built the car was sold out from General Motors, and the Falcon's replacement in the Mustang became even more of a frankenstein machine. In 2020 we are now left with a car that looks nothing like its road going counterpart versus another car from a company which no longer exists.
Throughout all of this, Supercars went from a system where competitors could enter events on a sort of ad hoc basis, to one where there were distinct Racing Entitlement Contracts which had the immediate effect of forever closing the doors to the privateers who had arguably built the biggest race that the Supercars actually had.
With the closure of Australian motor manufacturing, the complete abandoning of all right hand drive markets by General Motors and the closure of Holden as a brand, and the decision by Supercars management to put races behind News Corp's paywall, not only has the total amount of sponsorship dollars vastly shrunk but the number of teams has also been falling. 25 cars in the 2020 edition of the Bathurst 1000 is an unfunny joke; with a punchline which has been progressively getting sadder for the past decade.
This is the really idiotic thing. Older Supercars tend to live on after their front line use. They become the machinery which is used in the two divisions directly underneath Supercars (Super 2 and Super 3) and in other series. This means that there are in fact plenty of cars which could in theory fill the grid to as many as 55 cars and bring back the greatness to the Great Race. However, Supercars won't do this.
I can only assume that Supercars' management likes having a closed shop and that the competitors are nominally fine with it as well. The argument put forward I assume is that having other competitors who have zero chance at winning the race, makes the race more dangerous for those people who actually do have a shot at winning.
Further proof that Supercars likes having a closed shop and thus deliberately keeping out any potential new competitors, was their treatment of Nathan Herne who may have had a potential drive for Garry Rogers Motorsport in the 2020 race. He is a TransAm2 driver and there may have been a potential exemption for him to get a temporary Super license for the event but ultimately, Supercars dug in and Garry Rogers Motorsport withdrew the application; and subbed him out for Jayden Ojeda.
I can understand the sport wanting to limit the number of competitors into the series through fear of diluting the potential advertising dollars but when this results in the deliberate and very public atrophy of the series, then this also acts as a warning to anyone who might be interested that they had better be prepared to fall in or fall out.
It is the kind of approach to running a series that I find completely baffling. When faced with falling crowds and the situation which now exists where you have exactly zero support from any manufacturers at all, I do not understand why you would want to keep people out. Super 2 is already up at Bathurst this weekend as a support category and since the cars are built to older regulations, they are already compatible on the track. This is not the days of a Ford Sierra doing 300km/h and bearing down on a Toyota Corolla doing only 220km/h. In any case, the track itself is 6.2km long; so it's not like there aren't plenty passing spots.
Part-time competitors and privateers actually have a greater sense of self-preservation than professional front line drivers because quite often, thy are owner/operator drivers who personally suffer damage if their asset gets ruined. In fact, if you were to do a survey of accidents involving the top ten cars in a race over the years, you'd find that the vast majority are of top drivers tripping over each other rather than slower cars getting in the way. The only incident that I can immediately think of where a front running car tangled with a very obviously slower car was in the 1980 edition when Peter Brock's Commodore tagged the rear end of a Holden Gemini and put the Gemini out of the race (Brock would go on to win it).
If I was Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else then I would open up the Bathurst 1000 and the Sandown 500 as the two races where both Super 2 and Super 3 complete alongside the main feature Supercars cars. Legends were made when privateers had a go, when previously undiscovered talent was allowed to shine and where drivers actually had to work their way through the traffic.
I think that the race is bigger and better when it is allowed to be bigger and better but right now, it is looking inwards and wondering why the world is becoming smaller and smaller. It should be called The Great Race for a reason but at the moment it just doesn't live up to its moniker.
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