Venue Pukekohe Park Raceway First held 2001 Distance 100 km | Number of times held 11 Laps 35 Laps 35 | |
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The Auckland SuperSprint (formally known as the ITM Auckland SuperSprint) is an annual motor racing event for Supercars, held at Pukekohe Park Raceway in Pukekohe, New Zealand. The event has been a regular part of the Supercars Championship—and its previous incarnations, the Shell Championship Series and V8 Supercars Championship—since 2001.
Contents
The event has previously been known as the New Zealand V8 International from 2001 to 2005, the ITM 400 in 2013 and the ITM 500 in 2014 and 2015.
Format
The event is staged over a three-day weekend, from Friday to Sunday. Three half-hour practice sessions are held on Friday. Both Saturday and Sunday feature a pair of ten-minute qualifying sessions which decide the grid positions for the following two 100 kilometre sprint races.
Jason Richards Memorial Trophy
Since 2013, the driver who scores the most points across all races during the weekend has received the Jason Richards Memorial Trophy. The trophy was introduced at the 2013 event in honour of Jason Richards, a successful New Zealand Supercars driver who died in 2011. Jason Bright and Brad Jones Racing, Richards' last teammate and team respectively, were the first winners of the trophy. In 2015, Jamie Whincup, who was a teammate of Richards in 2005 at Tasman Motorsport and co-drove with him to a second-place finish at the 2005 Bathurst 1000, won the trophy.
Background
Pukehohe Park is one of New Zealand's most historic race tracks, and has long seen links with Australian motor racing. This dates back to the famed Pukekohe 500, which originally ran from 1984 to 1993. Several Australian teams, along with local and international teams, competed in the endurance Group A event with Australian-based teams winning the event several times. The event was often twinned with the Wellington 500, on a street circuit in Wellington City. In 1996, twelve cars from the Australian Touring Car Championship raced in a non-championship sprint round at Pukekohe Park. In a precursor to his later Supercars success at the track, all three races were won by Greg Murphy for the Holden Racing Team.
Championship era
The first championship round at Pukekohe Park for what was then known as V8 Supercars was held in 2001, entitled the Boost Mobile V8 International. It was the first round in the history of the Australian Touring Car Championship and Supercars not to be contested in Australia. Local driver Greg Murphy won the event, taking pole position and winning all three races. Murphy maintained strong form at Pukekohe, winning again in 2002, 2003 and 2005. Jason Bright was the only other driver to win the event in the first five years, doing so in 2004, while Murphy finished third. In 2005 there was a major accident involving Craig Baird and Paul Dumbrell during the third race. Jamie Whincup slid off the track at the final corner and Baird and Dumbrell squeezed together as Whincup returned to the circuit. However, Baird and Dumbrell came together and spun, both hitting the wall before coming to rest on opposite sides of the track with severely damaged cars. The race was red flagged as a result.
The New Zealand event moved to the Hamilton Street Circuit for 2008 and remained there until 2012. Supercars returned to a slightly modified Pukekohe in 2013 and the Jason Richards Memorial Trophy was introduced. In 2014, Ford's Mark Winterbottom was the event winner, marking the first win at the event for Ford in its ninth running. The event was run over the Anzac Day long weekend, including a race on a Friday for the first time in championship history. For 2015, the event returned to being held in November, and was won by Jamie Whincup, the first win at the event for the successful Triple Eight Race Engineering team.