Why Newcastle season opener will be great equaliser

When cars roll out for first Practice 1 in Newcastle on March 4, it will end an 831-day wait for racing in the Steel City.

The Repco Newcastle 500 will host the first round of the new season, with the Newcastle circuit returning for the first time since 2019.

The gruelling 2.6km street circuit hosted season finales between 2017 and 2019, and has been absent since due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2022, it will open a new season for the first time, becoming the sixth different New South Wales venue to host a season-opener.

Before it came the permanent venues in Gnoo Blas, Bathurst, Warwick Farm, Amaroo and Eastern Creek.

The concrete-lined Newcastle circuit is of the ilk of the Adelaide Parklands Circuit, which opened seasons for the best part of 20 years.

What made Adelaide so difficult was the nature of the circuit; tight, twisty, fast and uncompromising. A concrete canyon, waiting to bite.

Newcastle is much of the same, and the two 250km races will see drivers forced to approach the now season-opening event through a different lens.

“We always say we’ll go easy, but that’s such a small percentage of your maximum,” Walkinshaw Andretti United recruit Nick Percat told Supercars.com.

“There has to be some leeway to make it to the end, but at a street circuit, so much can go wrong.

“No one will leave anything on the table. Guys like Shane, Chaz, Cam, Anton, Will, they’ll be wringing their necks from lap one.”

For 51 weekends of the year, the circuit precinct is a standard beachside streetscape, taking in Newcastle Beach and the foreshore around Nobbys Beach Reserve.

On race weekend, as it proved between 2017 and 2019, it becomes a high-speed, sweeping car-killer.

Narrow entries, blind corners and, at some parts, zero run-off on exit. And, like Adelaide, some prime overtaking opportunities which can be fumbled by fatigued drivers.

What makes this Newcastle round so tantalising is the wholesale changes since its last appearance in 2019.

Seven drivers on the 2022 grid alone haven’t even raced a main game car there. Broc Feeney hasn’t even raced a Supercar there.

However, that doesn’t mean the 25 drivers on March 5 and 6 will take it easy.

“Everyone always says they’ll play it safe, but at street circuits, they never do,” Tickford Racing recruit Jake Kostecki told Supercars.com.

“I raced there in Super2 but even then, that was a few years ago, even before the last time [in 2019].

“I want to be consistent and keep my nose clean, it’s my first round [with Tickford].”

After 93 laps and almost two hours of racing on the Saturday, drivers will be buggered, spent and possibly nursing bent cars.

The magic of street circuit racing - which has largely been absent in the COVID years - sees them forced to rock up the next day and do it all again.

Therein lies the beauty of why Newcastle looms as the most important round of the year; start strong, and you set yourself up for the season.

Find trouble, and not only will you haemorrhage points, but you’ll risk major damage to your car at the outset.

And the hardest part? It has been three years since the last race in Newcastle, ensuring 2022 opens with a clean slate.

What makes a street circuit unique - and even more to the fact is has been three years for Newcastle - is that the racing surface is drastically different over time to that of a permanent circuit.

It’s a marked difference to the 2021 season, which opened at the same venue - Mount Panorama - that ended the 2020 season.

“I’m looking forward to it. That’s why I loved starting the year in Adelaide, because it was so bloody hard,” Percat said.

“It was a tough track, and it’s hot. It’s mentally hard and physically hard. It was a track where you have to man-handle the cars.

“Newcastle is the same, but it’s been a while since we’ve raced there.

"It’s not a bad thing that I don’t have any muscle memory or pre-conceived ideas about how the car needs to be.

“To be honest, I can barely remember what the track is like!"