Determinant of large sparse symbolic matrices

I am working on a symbolic circuit simulation program for electronic circuits (SLiCAP). I have a matlab (MuPAD) and a python version available.

The key task of such a program is the calculation of the determinant of sparse matrices with symbolic entries. The MuPAD (MATLAB symbolic toolbox) version calculates the determinant of a sparse matrix (dim = 52x52) with one symbolic variable (the Laplace variable) in about one minute (minor expansion, algorithm unknown). The Python version uses maxima and the newdet method (Gentleman-Johnson algorithm). This method is limited to dim=50x50, but I had to reduce the size to (30x30) because of memory paging errors reported by Lisp.

Now I would like to try SageMath with the "df" algorithm for this purpose, but its running more then 30 minutes ... I know the Gentleman-Johnson method is included in PyNAC but it doesn't seem to be included in the sage wrapper.

My questions:

1. Can SageMath be forced to use the Gentleman-Johnson algorithm included in PyNAC?
2. If not can a wrapper be build to do this?
3. If so, can someone help we with this?

written so that it can be used?