A new residents group opposed to the Newcastle Supercars race plans to play a life-like recording of touring car noise at a public briefing in the East End on Friday morning.
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Novocastrians Against Street Racing and Newcastle East Residents Group have advised the public to bring hearing protection to the meeting in Scott Street.
Retired NBN newsreader Ray Dinneen, a motor sport enthusiast, will chair the Scott Street event, which will include talks by residents, architectural historian Dr Steven Fleming and Newcastle intensive care specialist Dr Peter Saul.
“The whole point of it is that we’re not actually anti-Supercars; we’re just anti that location,” spokesman John Beach, who retired as principal of Newcastle East Public School late last year, told the Newcastle Herald.
“We’ve downloaded from the internet a recording of the actual V8 Supercars, and we’re going to play that on a massive PA.
“We’ve had an engineer set all this up for us at precisely the level Supercars say they produce, which is 95 decibels, measured at 30 metres.
“That equates to 105, 107 decibels at five metres. You can’t stand it. You literally can’t stand it. Even with ear plugs it’s beyond human endurance, and yet this is going to be right outside people’s houses for many hours.”
Neither Mr Dinneen nor Mr Beach live in the East End but are sympathetic to the residents’ concerns about the Newcastle 500 race meeting from November 24 to 26.
Mr Beach said he had become involved out of concern for his former students.
“Most of the students from Newcastle East school live in the area that’s directly affected by the race, and they’re going to be subjected to noise levels of about 105 decibels for 10 hours a day for three days in a row,” he said.
Mr Beach said residents opposed to the race had endured “a lot of abuse and a lot of threats” on social media.
“Some of them have been referred to the police,” he said. “Complete obscenities. Unbelievable.”
But he said residents had also received support from medical practitioners from outside the area and heritage groups from Adelaide and Melbourne who had been “caught up in these sort of battles with the Supercars”.
Work is expected to start this month on adapting East End roads so they can accommodate touring car racing. The track includes a new road through Nobbys park.
Work on pedestrian bridges, grandstands and other infrastructure will begin about six weeks before the event.
Newcastle will host the final round of the Supercars championship for at least the next five years under an agreement between the council, Supercars and the state government.