Class war revs up as scrapped race throws fans for a Superloop

South Australia, the self-proclaimed Festival State, is looking more like the State of Boredom.

Driver Nick Percait. Picture: Stefan Postles

South Australia, the self-proclaimed Festival State, is looking more like the State of Boredom, with the Marshall government under intense pressure to use Tuesday’s budget to inject new life into the battered events sector.

In the past two weeks, the state has lost January’s Tour Down Under cycling event due to the ­impact of the coronavirus and is bracing for crowd numbers and international performers to be reduced during next year’s popular “Mad March” season, the month when the Adelaide Festival, the Adelaide Fringe and the WOMAD world music festival coincide.

Then there’s the fibros versus silvertails battle over the future of V8 Supercars, pitting Adelaide’s eastern suburbs establishment against outer-suburban revheads who are enraged that Steven ­Marshall has killed the event.

The Superloop Adelaide 500 has been loved and loathed in equal measure since its inception in 1999, attracting thousands of motorsport fans but an equal number of complaints from residents of the city’s leafy east who hate the weeks of annual inconvenience.

Now the engines will be heard no more after the Premier acc­epted a recommendation from the Tourism Commission to scrap the event due to declining patronage and the challenges of COVID-19.

His decision has enraged the motorsport community, including the state’s first Bathurst winner, Superloop champion Nick Percait, who said Mr Marshall was “delusional” and “couldn’t have stuffed things more if he tried”.

“They have totally pulled the rug out from under an event that is loved by so many people and puts so much money back into the economy,” Percait said.

“It’s bloody heartbreaking that as a kid who grew up in Adelaide dreaming of competing on our own streets in this event that they have taken that dream away from future generations.”

It is a different story on the eastern side of town, where many voters in Mr Marshall’s seat of Dunstan are cheering the fact that the race is dead.

“It made such a racket, not just the cars but the jets that would fly overhead deafening us all,” Norwood resident Louise Lipman said while having coffee on the suburb’s fashionable cafe strip.

Mr Marshall insists he killed the event with a heavy heart after being swayed by the independent assessment of the Tourism Commission that a steady reduction in patronage meant the event was no longer viable.

Attendance fell from 273,000 in 2018 to 254,000 in 2019 and 206,000 this year, with the return to the state’s economy falling from $45.9m last year to $38m this year.

“We realised very quickly that this would be unviable in 2021 and, quite frankly, unviable going forward,” the Premier said.

But Supercars Australia says it has come up with an alternate plan for the 2021 race — moving it from March to November to end the clash with the arts festivals and to give the government more time to see off the coronavirus pandemic.