Motorsports and mullets, skids and burnouts … Summernats, the ACT’s annual car festival, will be back in January – “bigger and better than ever”, Andy Lopez, Summernats co-owner and managing director, says.

And measures have been taken to prevent the hooning and unruly behaviour that accompanied this year’s event.

StreetMachine Summernats 36 runs from Thursday 4 to Sunday 7 January at Exhibition Park.

“What the Summernats promises to bring to Canberra is more of the same fun and colour that we do every year, as well as over $30 million in economic impact,” Mr Lopez said. “It’s a great event for Canberra, and a great event for a quiet time of year.”

The event will feature the biggest burnout competition in Summernats history, the Summernats Burnout Masters grand final on Saturday evening, featuring the best burnout drivers in Australia.

There will be spectacular custom show cars: “Thirty brand new builds that have been in project for anywhere between five and 20 years,” Mr Lopez said. “Everything from hot rods to Australia muscle cars and American classics. The hours, expertise, love, and money poured into these new builds is mind blowing.”

A city cruise (noon on Thursday) will “bring a lot of excitement, colour, and noise and fun from inside Exhibition Park, out into the streets of Canberra in a safe and fun and well-managed way,” Mr Lopez said. This year, 500 cars made their way down Northbourne Avenue.

The music lineup is the biggest yet, he said: The Screaming Jets (a hard rock band) and singers Jimmy Barnes and Daryl Braithwaite will perform on the Friday night, and Hot Dub Time Machine (a DJ) on the Saturday.

The Braddon Fringe Festival is one of the “newest and most exciting aspects” of this year’s Summernats, Mr Lopez said. Held for the first time in 2022, it features vehicles, live music, and food and drink; this time, the Fringe Festival has been extended from two nights to three, running from the Thursday to the Saturday, 5pm to 11pm.

There will, Mr Lopez said, be “three nights of cruising … in the heart of Canberra, bringing a lot of noise, colour, and economic impact to the hospitality businesses here in Braddon”.

This year’s Fringe Festival saw a 125 per cent increase in non-resident visitation and more than $1 million extra spent at Braddon traders, Malcolm Snow, CEO of the City Renewal Authority, which sponsors the Fringe Festival, said – a boon for the start of January.

“We’re looking to ensure that this precinct gets an economic boost from the event,” Chief Minister Andrew Barr said.

Some are not fans, however. This year, Dave Sera ran an unsuccessful petition demanding that Summernats be banned from Braddon. Air pollution impacted the environment and health of local residents, he claimed; drunken behaviour threatened residents, and many in the diverse and queer-friendly suburb felt unsafe; and there were loud car noises until the early hours of the morning.

Part of a varied events calendar

The Chief Minister expects that Summernats would “kickstart a really big year of tourism in Canberra”. This year, more than 125,000 people attended the event, including US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, and Mr Barr anticipates similar numbers – the first of more than 5.5 million people he hopes will visit the ACT in 2024.

Half a million people visit Floriade each year, half of them from interstate; while an exhibition at the National Gallery will attract hundreds of thousands of people.

“[Summernats] is part of a varied event calendar,” Mr Barr said. “A little bit of something for everyone in Canberra over the course of the year.”

Tickets will be in hot demand, Mr Lopez predicts. Summernats car entries sold out in May: “the fastest we’ve ever actually filled in those entrant slots”. He anticipates spectator passes will sell out before Christmas.

“It’s a great show of faith in this festival, where it means, and what it means for Canberra and the StreetMachine community,” Mr Lopez said.

This year’s Summernats was all but sold out for the first time ever. Besides the historic crowd numbers, entrant numbers were at a record 2,700.

However, the event was also spoiled by drunken and rowdy behaviour. When the festival’s cruise circuit closed early, due to unruly behaviour, large crowds moved on to watch illegal driving in locales across the ACT (including Fyshwick), and attacked police, the ABC reported.

Over the weekend, ACT Policing issued 18 traffic infringement notices and two cautions, arrested several people for assault, breach of bail, and intoxicated and disorderly conduct, and seized seven vehicles for driving offences.

The Australian Federal Police Association (AFPA) insisted Summernats organisers improve their security at EPIC, and condemned them for placing police and community members at risk.

Mr Lopez said at the time that that the disrupters were not part of Summernats, that this was the first time such behaviour had occurred, and that it never would again.

Summernats organisers say they have worked with police and other stakeholders to improve security management and response.

“We’ve taken a number of measures including banning the small number of entrants who participated in poor behaviour at the event,” Mr Lopez said. “This includes more detailed engagement with the police and other agencies in planning, and the buy-in from the Summernats community.”

The Chief Minister also minimised the likelihood of such incidents recurring next month.

“At the end of each event, [Mr Lopez] sits down with the various ACT Government officials, police, and others, and does a post-event evaluation,” Mr Barr said. “We look at what went really well, a few things that could be improved, and work on that for the next year’s events. So those sorts of things are looked at, and there are responses that are put in place each year.”

Net-zero emissions policy

The ACT, however, intends to phase out the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035; how does supporting a festival celebrating fossil fuel-powered cars sit with that policy?

The Chief Minister believes the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045 is compatible with hosting a festival celebrating fossil fuel-powered cars.

“This issue comes up every year,” Mr Barr said.

“Vehicles that have already been manufactured will continue to be good on our roads for decades. We’re targeting net zero emissions by 2045. There will still be some activities that will emit carbon. We will obviously have to offset those. So I think you can do both, and we are able to achieve that.

“But I do know that over time, fuel efficiency continues to improve, synthetic fuels will arrive as a new form of propulsion for internal combustion engines, and electric vehicles will continue to get cheaper and better. The technology is far superior to internal combustion engines and so in time, obviously that will be the preferred mode of transport. But that is still decades away.”