The event is staged over a three-day weekend, from Friday to Sunday. Three thirty-minute practice sessions are held, two on Friday and one on Saturday. Saturday features a twenty-minute qualifying session which decides the grid positions for the following 200 kilometre race. A twenty-minute qualifying session is held on Sunday, succeeded by a top ten shootout, the combined results of which decide the grid for the following 200 km race. In 2014 only, the event was extended to 500 kilometres overall, with two 125 km races on Saturday and a 250 km race on Sunday.
History
The event was announced in late 2007, following the allocation of funding from both the federal and the Queensland state government. The event became the third Queensland event on the calendar, joining Queensland Raceway in Ipswich and the Surfers Paradise Street Circuit on the Gold Coast. However, Townsville did become the first major motor racing event to be held in the North Queensland region. The event is held in early July each year. Jamie Whincup won the first race on the circuit in 2009, with James Courtney winning the Sunday race. Whincup would go on to win the Saturday race again in 2010 with Mark Winterbottom this time winning the second race. 2011 and 2012 saw four consecutive wins for Holden, with Whincup winning three more races at the circuit. In 2013, Russell Ingall broke the all time championship event starts record at the event. In the Sunday race, the Holden Racing Team scored a one-two finish with Tander leading home Courtney. They would repeat the one-two finish in the second Saturday race of the 2014 event. Winterbottom won both races in 2015 to become the only driver other than Whincup, who achieved the feat in 2012, to achieve a clean sweep of the event. In the first ten years of the event, Whincup's record was unsurpassed, winning ten of the twenty-one races held at the track. Only Tander and Winterbottom and van Gisbergen won multiple races at the circuit up to 2018. 2019 saw the first wet race in the event's history on the Sunday, which eventually saw van Gisbergen prevail after a chaotic race featuring several incidents and a pit lane fire at Brad Jones Racing.
