Adelaide International Raceway - Speedway Super Bowl

Speedway Super Bowl

Beginning in the early 1970s, and following the American NASCAR influence which at the time was drawing record crowds, paved short track speedway was becoming popular in Australia and with the Speedway Super Bowl, Adelaide a ready made track. Compared to the now closed 440m long Liverpool Speedway in Sydney and the 410m Tralee Speedway in Canberra, the Super Bowl was a ½ mile track and supremely fast with room on the 200m long straights for cars to reach higher speeds while the Super Bowl's longer 200m long turns are banked slightly at approximately 7°, making cornering faster. The turns of the bowl being banked made turn 7 of the full circuit (turn 5 on the short course) slightly off-camber as cars entered the Bowl.

The Speedway Super Bowl held winter race meetings and was first used on 16 June 1974 when a large crowd turned up to see competitors from Rowley Park Speedway drive on the new asphalt speedway. It quickly became apparent that cars built for a ¼ mile dirt track speedway were out of their depth on the ½ mile Super Bowl with the Modified Rods (Sprintcars) reaching over 170 km/h on the straights when they were only used to about 80 km/h on dirt. Sedan driver Jim Curnow was knocked unconscious when his Holden Torana hit the concrete retaining wall and chronic Understeer was the biggest complaint of almost all drivers with cars generally being set up for dirt and not asphalt. Some sedan drivers then started building cars that were suited to racing on the Super Bowl with a space frame chassis, well tuned V8 engines and wide slick tyres and these cars quickly dominated. The problem was that there were too few of them with some races only having five or six competitors. Most drivers eventually decided it was more fun racing on the dirt at Rowley Park and with crowd numbers dwindling due to both the tracks location (26 km north of the city) and the dwindling number of competitors, speedway meetings stopped being held after 1976. Speedway Super Sedans did return to AIR in the late 1980s for some daytime meetings, however crowds were down.

In an ironic twist, when Rowley Park ceased operating in April 1979, Adelaide's new speedway venue Speedway Park (now called Speedway City), was opened adjacent to AIR in October 1979, the crowds returned despite the same travel time to get there as for AIR.

AIR's Speedway Super Bowl was also a regular and popular short track venue for AUSCAR and NASCAR racing during the 1990s with crowds of up to 15,000 attending the annual Adelaide round of the Australian Championships. The Super Bowl was and still is the only race circuit still in operation in Australia other than the Calder Park Thunderdome where the race cars can run on a paved oval track, with both tracks currently owned the Bob Jane Corporation. The outright lap record for the Super Bowl of 22.7012 was set in a NSACAR by Terry Whyhoon driving a Ford Thunderbird during the 1997/98 Goodyear Australian SuperSpeedway Series.

The fastest qualifying and race laps set during speedway meetings was set in 1976 by John Hughes (later the founder of World Series Sprintcars) driving a Holden 308 powered HJ Holden One Tonner ute chassis covered by HJ Monaro bodywork. His times were 23.8 for qualifying and 23.2 seconds race lap, which were not much slower than the more powerful (with 20+ years of engine, tyre and suspension development) NASCAR and AUSCAR times set during the late 1990s. Indeed, Hughes' qualifying time of 23.8 in 1976 would have placed him 8th on the NASCAR starting grid for the SuperSpeedway Series meeting some 22 years later (the two categories both raced anti-clockwise).

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Famous quotes containing the words speedway and/or bowl:

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