TIME-CERTAIN finishes continue to be a serious bugbear of Supercars fans, but they can be better handled to reduce grievances in future.

That’s the assertion made on the latest episode of The Undercut by co-host Aaron Noonan, who has called on the championship to better communicate with viewers.

Supercars currently has time-certainty in place for all races on its calendar other than the Bathurst 1000.

That is something it is reviewing – i.e. the possibility of diminishing time-certainty at least for races not bound by free-to-air broadcast window constraints – but nevertheless the point stands.

Essentially, when for whatever reason (be it Safety Car periods, wet weather, delays/stoppages) a race encroaches upon the pre-arranged time-certain cut-off, Supercars routinely leaves it to the last minute to convey to fans that the full distance might not be reached.

That tends to amplify agitations, as Noonan outlined.

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“My argument is that (at The Bend) in particular, it felt like to a lot of fans that time-certain gets flicked with half an hour to go – ‘oh we’re now going time-certain’,” he said.

“Is it on the broadcast and on Supercars more to hammer it earlier in the day?

“It’s kind of like if you go to the shop and you go ‘I’m going to buy a 147-lap race today, I’m buying something for $50’ and then you take it to the cash register; ‘yep, it’s $50 but actually let me just take a little part off that before you walk out of the shop’.

“To the race fan, I get that’s how it feels. So if you get it presented earlier from the very start of the race, more often in the race earlier on that ‘this is not a 147-lap race, it’s a 147-lap race or 5:53pm +1 lap, whichever comes first’.

“It’s got to be part of the way that it’s portrayed.”

Aaron Noonan

He doubled down: “(Fans) feel like it’s ‘when the race became time-certain, or when they decided to make it time-certain’. That’s totally not the case. It was always time-certain from the minute the supp regs were written in the way that the scheduling is done.

“So then the onus is back on the championship, the broadcast, the teams, everybody involved, to inform and communicate to the audience that this is the deal: ‘Today we’re going car racing and it will be that or it will be that, depending on how it plays out’.”

It’s worth noting that the Dunlop Super2 Series’ 2023 move to timed races has helped ease previous tensions that would often surface pertaining to the number of laps completed versus the number of laps scheduled.

Co-host James Moffat also made the astute point that Supercars could further help its cause by starting races earlier in order to allow for margin for error before time-certainty kicks in.