IF the well-sourced but unconfirmed speculation is correct, and the Newcastle 500 race weekend is dropped from a revised Supercars schedule, then the Hunter Region will have lost one of the year's biggest sporting and tourism attractions.
East End residents opposed to the race were celebrating yesterday, and will no doubt hope that a one-year hiatus will become a permanent erasure of the season-ending Newcastle event.
Rare as such occurrences are, there is no good time for a major professional sporting event or code to have a season knocked around or lost altogether.
But COVID-19 and its associated trans-Tasman lockdowns have come at a critical juncture for Supercars, and for the Newcastle race.
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After three years in Newcastle, organisers were at a point where they had the track assembly and other logistics running as smoothly as possible.
The race has clearly been a winner, visually, as far as the sport's large pay-TV audience is concerned, and spectator counts have not fallen too far from the historic first year.
The criticism that accompanied the first two races eased last year, although the die-hard opponents continued to make their presence felt.
Supercars came to the region on a five-year contract, with an option to proceed for another five if things went well.
Negotiations on such options usually start well before expiry time, but the uncertainty created by the coronavirus may have put such decision-making on the back burner, to the benefit of neither Supercars or Newcastle.
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Supercars are understood to have axed this year's Newcastle race after realising that social distancing was impossible, and the race would cost too much to run without paying spectators.
But the sport's overall future revenues are also under a cloud, with a six-year, $241 million deal cut with Network Ten and Foxtel set to expire this year.
Traditional pay-TV was already under pressure from streaming services, and the global coronavirus shutdown of professional sport has decimated the income streams of virtually every major network brand.
The sports, in turn, are already cutting their cloth in anticipation of less income when they do return, and Supercars will be no exception.
As much as the Newcastle 500 clearly impacts on those who live inside or around the circuit, the race has developed into a key piece of the unfinished jigsaw puzzle that is the new-look 21st-century Newcastle.
Its loss, even if only for a year, is to be lamented.
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