Supercars Eseries to pit pros against average Joes

Australia’s Supercars series won’t be running any races until June at the very earliest – and potentially beyond if the COVID-19 shutdown is extended – but fans will still be able to tune in to a virtual substitute to get their racing fix

Dubbed the Supercars All Stars Eseries, it’ll feature a broad array of Australian professional drivers… and will also allow average Joes and Josephines to have a crack themselves.

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The Eseries starts tomorrow night, April 8, and uses iRacing as its platform – just like a bunch of other racing codes right now. Because iRacing is already a well-established driving sim with a substantial player base, Supercars has taken the admirable step of giving its fans the opportunity to try their hand at what the pros will be doing.

However, it won’t be wheel-to-wheel. Instead, Supercars are making the same setups the race drivers will use (all cars on the Eseries grid will have identical settings to ensure parity) available for download, meaning the stay-at-home crowd will be able to drive the same tracks in the same cars in a time-attack mode.

It’s a little different from actually mixing it with top-tier drivers, but as far as audience participation goes it’s still a cool idea.

With 25 big-name drivers like Andre Heimgartner, David Reynolds, Jamie Whincup, Rick Kelly, Fabian Coulthard, Mark Winterbottom and Shane van Gisbergen all set to be on the Eseries grid, it’ll be fascinating to see how close the ‘civilians’ can get to the qualifying times of the professionals.

(In fact, tune back into our story later in the week - we're planning on throwing our own tame iRacing driver at the challenge to see how close we can get!)

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Brodie Kostecki, the 22-year-old current leader of the Dunlop Super2 Series is the driver responsible for fixing the vehicle setups for the Supercars Eseries, and says it should be simple for punters to get involved as long as they have a current iRacing subscription.

“The setups that will be used in the first round of the BP All Star Eseries are going to be available on the Supercars.com website, so head over there, download them, do some laps, post your lap times and we’ll see if we can have a bit of fun!” he said.

“Everyone is going to be on the same set-up so everyone has got the same chance at having a crack at a win.”

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The Eseries will be broadcast from 7PM AEST on April 8 on Fox Sports 506 and live-streamed on Kayo, Ten Play, the Supercars Twitch channel and the Supercars Facebook page, with weekly races for the next ten weeks.

Supercars Eseries Schedule

Take a look at the schedule below to see which (virtual) tracks the Eseries will be heading to.

• Round 1, April 8 - Phillip Island and Monza
• Round 2, April 15 - Silverstone and Barcelona
• Round 3, April 22 - Mount Panorama
• Round 4, April 29 - Montreal and Watkins Glen
• Round 5, May 6 - Spa and Nürburgring
• Round 6, May 13 - Circuit of the Americas and Sebring
• Round 7, May 20 - Daytona Speedway and Talladega SuperSpeedway
• Round 8, May 27 - Imola and Interlagos
• Round 9, June 3 - Road Atlanta and Road America
• Round 10, June 10 - Oran Park and Mount Panorama