The Townsville 500 (formally known as the NTI Townsville 500) is an annual motor racing event for Supercars, held on the Reid Park Street Circuit in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. The event has been held since 2009.[1]
The event was known as the Townsville 400, based on a 400 kilometre format, in ten of the first eleven years of the event. In 2021, the event returned to the 500 kilometre format first used in 2014, while in both 2020 and 2021, two Townsville events were held under the Townsville SuperSprint banner due to calendar changes and shorter races caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.[2][3]
History
The event was announced in late 2007, following the allocation of funding from both the federal and the Queensland state government.[5] The event became the third Queensland event on the calendar, joining Queensland Raceway in Ipswich and the Surfers Paradise Street Circuit on the Gold Coast. However, Townsville did become the first major motor racing event to be held in the North Queensland region.[5] The event is generally held in early July each year, which aligns with the school holidays of the Townsville State High School which borders the track.[6]
Jamie Whincup won the first race on the circuit in 2009, a race which was later reduced by one lap after it was discovered it had extended beyond the time certain finish without being noticed.[7] James Courtney won the Sunday race, his first victory for Dick Johnson Racing.[8] Whincup would go on to win the Saturday race again in 2010 with Mark Winterbottom this time winning the second race. 2011 and 2012 saw four consecutive wins for Holden, with Whincup winning three more races at the circuit. In 2013, Russell Ingall broke the all time championship event starts record at the event, while Will Davison hit the fence as part of his post-race victory celebrations in the first race of the weekend.[9][10] In the Sunday race, the Holden Racing Team scored a one-two finish with Tander leading home Courtney.[11] The team would repeat the one-two finish in the second Saturday race of the 500 kilometre 2014 event, with Tander winning from 11th on the grid in the one-off dual-race Saturday format.[12]
Winterbottom won both races in 2015 to become the only driver other than Whincup, who achieved the feat in 2012, to achieve a clean sweep of the event.[13] In the first ten years of the event, Whincup's record was unsurpassed, winning ten of the twenty-one races held at the track.[14] Only Tander and Winterbottom (three each) and van Gisbergen (two) won multiple races at the circuit up to 2018. 2019 saw the first wet race in the event's history on the Sunday, beginning with Scott McLaughlin and David Reynolds clashing on Lap 1 which led to tensions between the drivers and teams involved extending for over a year.[15] The race eventually saw van Gisbergen prevail after a chaotic race featuring several incidents and a pit lane fire at Brad Jones Racing.[16]
The 2020 event was initially delayed to August due to the COVID-19 pandemic, before a second Townsville event was announced to be held one week later in early September. Both 2020 events, the only Queensland events on the final calendar, used a three-race sprint format under the Townsville SuperSprint event name.[17] 2021 again saw a double-header as the impacts of COVID-19 in Australia persisted, with the first of the two a return to a 500 kilometre event distance last used in 2014.[18] Triple Eight Race Engineering dominated the Townsville 500, leading all but one of the 176 laps, with van Gisbergen prevailing over Whincup in both races.[19]
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Broc Feeney
