Big rethink of Superloop 500 urged by race architect Roger Cook

Next year’s Superloop 500 will need a significant rework to keep its numbers up in a post-Holden era, says the man responsible for bringing the race to the city.

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The Superloop 500’s architect and long-serving inaugural chairman is urging a major rethink of the 21-year-old car race because of plummeting support and the beloved Holden brand’s axing.

Former South Australian Motor Sport board chairman Roger Cook said record low attendance figures for the four-day event, coupled with the Holden-Ford rivalry ending at year’s end, should trigger a major overhaul ahead of the state’s current Supercars Championship deal expiring after next year’s race.

The 22nd race carnival attracted 206,350 patrons – the lowest since 171,200 in 2002, when the event ran over three days, rather than four.

Superloop 500 inaugural chairman Roger Cook.

Events South Australia executive director Hitaf Rasheed said this year’s event would be reviewed but, along with Bathurst, it remained the “jewel in the Supercars series crown and there are no plans to move it”.

Mr Cook, under whose 12-year reign the race became the most awarded event in SA and in Australian motor racing, said there was now an opportunity to look afresh at the Superloop, first run through Adelaide’s inner east in 1999.

“It needs a big rethink on two counts – the plummeting support for it in the state and also the fact that Holden have pulled out, which means Supercars are going to have to come up with a new formula as well,” he said.

Mr Cook in the late 1990s was the major projects tsar for the then-Liberal premier John Olsen (now Liberal state president) and was instrumental in luring a Supercar Championship round to the Adelaide street circuit, as part of a suite of events to replace the Australian Formula One Grand Prix (the final race was in 1995).

He steered the former Clipsal 500 and SA Motor Sport boards until stepping down after the 2011 race.

Mr Cook condemned as “shortsighted” the former Labor government’s 2014 axing of the motorsport board, saying this had squandered the motorsport and business expertise of a group dedicated to continually improving the event in the state’s interest.

Ms Rasheed said the $150 million The Bend circuit, which first hosted a Supercars race in 2018, added to SA’s “great motorsport heritage” by hosting a second race.

“The two events are in the same (Supercars) family but offer two very different experiences,” she said.

Ms Rasheed thanked Superloop patrons, saying it was hard to think of many other SA events that attracted more than 200,000 people over four days, particularly given the nation’s tough start to the year.