The changes come as part of a raft of rule tweaks that were announced by V8s this morning, with the series deciding to scratch Friday running at both those rounds and start with practice on the Saturday.

Both of those rounds run to the SuperSprint format, which this year means one 120-kilometre race on Saturday (instead of two 60-kilometre races), with a grid determined by a single 15-minute qualifying session (rather than back-to-back 10-minute sessions).

At the SuperSprint rounds that do include Friday running, practice has been reduced to two 40-minute sessions, as opposed to the 60-minute sessions used in 2015.

The testing regulations for 2016 have also been clarified; with the compulsory pre-season test scrapped, teams now have three days of testing at their disposal for the year. However, one has to be used before the season-opening Clipsal 500.

Manufacturers will also be given three test days to evaluate new Gen2-inspired body shapes.

Teams will be allocated five sets of new Dunlop tyres – three sets of softs and two sets of hards – specifically for testing.

There has also been a minor tweak to the use of the soft tyre at the Clipsal 500. Thanks to Craig Lowndes’s tyre failure on the softer compound Dunlop at Pukekohe last year, V8s has elected to run just one of Saturday’s 125-kilometre races on the grippier tyre. The rest of the running will be done on the hard.

The tyre regs for the Australian Grand Prix support races have also been given a tune-up, with each driver allocated four sets of soft tyres for the four races. A new set must be used each race.

Those tyres will then be used again for the co-driver only sessions at Winton and Queensland Raceway.