Mark WalkerCOMMENT: The NASCAR Calendar Experiment & Supercars
NASCAR is in the midst of a revolution, with wholesale changes to its calendar – could Supercars similarly mix things up in the future? This week it was announced that the season-opening non-points NASCAR Clash event would move from its spiritual home of the high banks of Daytona to a temporary 400m-long short track inside the century-old Los Angeles Memorial Colosseum, the home multiple Olympic Games and Super Bowls. The move is a massive step away from tradition for the invitation-only event, which dates back to 1979. From a logistical standpoint for the teams, having a race on the other
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Team TRTRANKED: 2021 Eseries Round 4
JUST when you think the madness stops and some normality at a road course returns, Supercars selects Monza for the next round of the ESeries journey. But surely lightning couldn't strike twice in a week, could it? Could Monza deliver more entertainment this week, as it did on Sunday night? The answer was, of course, a firm yes. While things were firmly sorted at the front, behind there was all kind of stuff going on that, coupled with a very professional race from the professionals, made for another very entertaining ninety minutes of mid-week entertainment. Read on as we give
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Richard CraillCOMMENT: The big, bold last roll of the dice
BY NOW you would have seen the news that the Repco Bathurst 1000 will see Supercars and key Australian Racing Group categories join forces for a massive six-day show this December. Without wanting to be overly melodramatic, this is it: This is the chance to get Bathurst in this year, to get the major national categories back on track at least once and to try and close out the year with something akin to normality. It couldn’t happen earlier in November thanks to the Vaccination ‘race’ and thanks to other sports it couldn’t happen later, so this is an opportunity
Continue readingPODCAST: On the grid talks memorabilia memories
THIS WEEK On the Grid we're delving into our personal collections of motorsport paraphernalia as we list our five favourite bits of memorabilia collected by the team over the years. From broken bits of racing cars to many linear metres of books and everything in between, you'll learn what treasures Schibeci, Walker and Craill all like the most. There's also a rundown of the bumper six-day Bathurst event just announced, Italian Grand Prix talk and much more. We're an Indy 500 grid - 33 - number of episodes into the year! listen to it now, later, on demand, on your
Continue readingAussies ready for more Le Mans Cup success
FRESH from an impressive top-six performance at the iconic Le Mans circuit in France, Garnet Patterson and Andres Latorre will have another shot at more Michelin Le Mans Cup glory this weekend at another iconic track. The Revere Racing duo will tackle the fifth round of the series this weekend at Spa Francorchamps in Belgium with a bid to continue their strong momentum from the 24-Hour warm-up race. Patterson and Latorre finished an outstanding sixth in the first of two one-hour races at Le Mans aboard their Revere Racing Duqueine D08 LMP3 car, run by Mühlner Motorsport. The combo qualified twelfth for the 60-minute
Continue readingRATINGS: Box-office Ricciardo win
AUSSIE Formula One fans have stayed up en masse to watch Daniel Ricciardo deliver McLaren a famous victory in the Italian Grand Prix, last night. An average audience of 130,000 people watched the race - which started at 11:00pm AEST - making it the second most watched Grand Prix of the year to date, proving Ricciardo's box-office draw among Aussie sports fans. Only the Azerbaijan GP, which started at the much more user-friendly time of 9:00pm AEST, drew a larger audience. The race, which saw World Championship contenders Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen controversially collide at the first chicane, is
Continue readingI Got Vaxxed at a Race Track
I live in locked down Melbourne, but I still managed to spend my Sunday morning at a race track. You see, there are numerous venues with a motorsport or motoring theme around Australia where you can receive your COVID-19 vaccine, including here in Melbourne, where a drive-through hub has been set up at Sandown Raceway. If you have a level of vaccine hesitancy, perhaps the prospect of heading along to a current or former race track would get you across the line? While the east side of Melbourne has Sandown, which was recently launched by motorsport legend John Bowe, above,
Continue readingUP CLOSE: Australia’s Ferrari F1 Twins
Nothing quite stirs the emotions of race fans quite like the screaming F1 cars of the 1980s, especially so if the machine is branded with a Prancing Horse. As we have examined here previously on The Race Torque, Australia is home to numerous classic Formula One examples, with Guido Belgiorno-Nettis the custodian of two of the best: matching Ferrari 156/85s. All told, it was a highly successful model for the Maranello marque, claiming second in the 1985 Constructor’s Championship to McLaren, with Michele Alboreto leading the Driver’s title during the mid-part of the year before settling for second at season’s
Continue readingFantasy Supercars Airport Tracks
In this week’s On the Grid Podcast, we rattled off a list of dream street circuits around the country, which when combined with fan feedback got the juices flying (big pun) – which Australian airports could we easily convert into race tracks? Check out the podcast right here... we also chat to Craig Lowndes, who is also kind of a big deal... In recent memory, tracks like Burke Lakefront Airport (Indycar), Diepholz Airfield (DTM) and Berlin-Tempelhof (Formula E) have all hosted some excellent high-level motorsport. Closer to home, post-World War II, many former military airfields were repurposed for motorsport, with
Continue readingRANKED: 2021 Eseries Round 3
ANOTHER week, another Wednesday night of light entertainment in virtual racing form to keep the lockdown vibe upbeat. And the third round of the Supercars ESeries certainly did just that, with a 'Pro' race that was scarily lifelike and an All-Star show that was.. actually, oddly realistic of a usual NASCAR plate race. Here's the usual round-up in TRT's RANKED column, with everything you needed to know from another night out on the couch. 1. Daytona Turn-two lap-one, real-life seat swapees Andre Heimgartner and Matt Payne started the big one, which aptly for Florida, saw Tony D'Alberto sent on a
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