THE ongoing expansion of Sydney’s Covid-19 crisis, lockdowns there, in Melbourne and Adelaide and the slamming shut of state borders across the country is clearly not good news for anyone.

Already the major codes in Australian sport, the AFL and NRL, are moving frantically to shift their schedules to adapt and overcome the challenges of being a national competition in a decidedly non-national environment.

Supercars, too, quickly threw together a second round in Townsville to, if you pardon the rather topical pun, get ahead of the curve and ‘bank’ a round where they could buy themselves time in the back end of the season.

But with the Sydney outbreak showing no signs of slowing down, the second half of the domestic motor racing season suddenly looks and feels extremely shaky.

Dramatic action has already been taken to ensure the season can continue, but you can’t help but feel that there is more to come.

And I suspect at the centre of that will be the Great Race.

Why 2021 is different to 2020

LAST year was unique in that the major Covid-19 outbreak was centred in Melbourne, with the city locked down for months and all states and territories closing their borders to Victoria for much of the year.

That saw the now well-documented events of all the Melbourne-based teams packing up shop and leaving for more than 100 days out on the road, away from home, in a bid to get some kind of a season in.

That, rather successful given the circumstances, season ended at Mount Panorama with another gripping Bathurst 1000, run a week later than scheduled and in front of just a few thousand lucky fans. After that, the teams packed up and finally were able to return home to friends and family.

This year is different and, in many ways, much worse.

Keeping the Melbourne teams on the road again was going to be more challenging and costly than ever – it just wasn’t an option.

And with New South Wales locked out, with no definitive way of knowing when this current wave of infections will ease and ultimately end, keeping everyone guessing (or running the remaining rounds exclusively in Queensland) wasn’t a plausible way for the sport to operate.

So, Melbourne teams have gone home and there’s now hard borders between Victoria and New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria and Queensland and New South Wales.

Assuming on the first hand that exemptions would even be granted – a topic on which there is no firm yes or no answer – as it stands now teams would have to quarantine for two weeks entering one state and then a further two on their way home just to get one race meeting in.

So, the sport is parked up for at least the next four weeks but with Queensland’s latest border controls with New South Wales lasting until at least the week prior to the next scheduled round in Ipswich, it seems more likely that there will be no racing until September at the earliest.

The bright side? States and territories have proven this year – with Queensland the most recent example – that once outbreaks are clearly under control, contained and managed, they are (with the possible exception of WA) willing to open borders much more quickly than was the case twelve months ago.

So that’s a positive – but to get to that point the outbreak has to be contained first and as we type, there’s little to indicate that is occurring any time soon in the Harbor city.

So why move Bathurst?

THE ABC ran a story this week detailing computer modelling that produced data that there’s every chance Sydney is going to need to be locked down until at least early September in a bid to crush this Delta Covid-19 variant.

In the best-case scenario, that becomes October at the absolute earliest before other states even consider opening their borders to the state – especially with the recent number of cases that have escaped the city and found their way to towns within just 50km of our sacred ground in Bathurst.

It’s hard to see anyone getting into or out of New South Wales until at least the current 7-10 October Bathurst date. If you’re a realist, it’s probably later.

That’s why moving Bathurst now makes sense.

Bathurst is critically important to the Supercars Championship and with a new broadcaster and new major sponsor aboard this year it is critically important that it is a success.

At least, the biggest possible success it can be in these trying times.

It’s the most-watched motor race in Australia each year and comfortably one of the largest sporting events on Australian TV. And for Supercars, who promote the race, a big crowd at Bathurst is an enormous revenue-driver which helps underpin the bottom line of the company significantly.

Giving the race the best possible chance to be held in a Covid-free, or at least less-restricted, environment must be an absolute priority. And looking into the crystal ball? That means moving it from October.

The date is obvious..

As it just so happens, there’s a perfectly good weekend now open on the calendar that the race could easily inherit: The November 18-21 weekend that was once the slot of the Australian Grand Prix, now consigned to the history books for the second year in a row.

Pushing Bathurst to become the penultimate round of the 2021 championship makes all the sense in the world.

Assuming Victoria and South Australia get their you-know-what together in the next few weeks, there’s plenty of opportunity to get what would be the eighth, ninth and tenth rounds of the championship done and dusted in what would likely be September and October.

Buying time with the bonus Townsville round was a masterstroke and engineered flexibility into the calendar moving forward, leaving just five events to get done in the same number of months in order to meet their contractually required 12 for TV payments to flow.

But there’s nothing to say those five events couldn’t happen in late October, November and December, especially following what would be a long midyear pause.

Given the fact it seems impossible to expect Perth or New Zealand to happen this year, rounds at Queensland Raceway, Winton, perhaps The Bend again or Phillip Island would tick the TV boxes required to get the calendar in.

And while the series (and the broadcasters, for that matter) is desperate to get their planned debut under Sydney Motorsport Park’s new lights in this year, given the potentially massive prime-time ratings on offer, perhaps that gets pushed back to the latest possible opportunity as a Bathurst warm-up. Or, you keep Winton or The Bend on hot standby as a backup.

You then run Bathurst in late November and head to the Gold Coast for the finale a fortnight later.

And with the Bathurst International set for the weekend in between those two, it’s a three-week party to end the season in style – all of them live on Channel 7, too.

Worst case scenario? GC and Bathurst swap and suddenly you buy yourself an extra fortnight of time.

Queensland may well have a deal to host the finale’, but those deals can be changed if the right things are said and hey, it’s not like the 1000 would be corrupted by being the title decider again – SVG is going to have it won well before then, anyway..

No Sacred Sites

OF course, traditionalists will fly up in arms should the Great Race not be held on its ‘traditional’ early October slot – but these are not the times for traditions, they are the times to survive and maximize what we have in a bid to keep it going in the first place.

The Supercar-Super Touring split in 1997 saw that year’s Primus 1000 pushed back a fortnight to avoid the two-litre race on the ‘traditional’ date.

A year later it moved to November 15, that mid-November slot held for three seasons before Supercars ultimately won the Bathurst war and returned to the October slot for 2001.

It’s worth noting that at no point did the Bathurst 1000’s TV ratings or attendance decline because it was held in November, so while tradition is important, just having Bathurst is importanter (it’s a word).

Keep the Great Race Great

AT no point would you want to be in charge of running a major sporting code in Australia at the moment.

With borders changing almost daily and outbreaks in three major markets of huge concern, it’s as stressful a time for big sports business (and little sports business, for that matter) as at any point last year.

But we have to believe that the states will eventually get things under control and we’ll be able to finish this season in some way, shape or form.

Central to that is getting the Great Race in and doing it successfully.

Unlike the debates around January 26, there seems little case for arguing that a temporary date change makes the world of sense for an arguably more important fixture on the Australian cultural landscape.