MOTORSPORT: A big step for John Martin

Motorsport reportFriday, January 11, 2008

Martin's chance to prove he's A1
The launch of new cars from Formula 1 racing's two top teams, Ferrari and McLaren, as well as Toyota and confirmation of Giancarlo Fisichella driving for Force India (previously Spyker, Midland and Jordan) has been pretty mundane from what we've observed, so we'll devote today's column mainly to some good news on the A1 GP front.

We tipped here a month or so ago that John Martin (pictured) would be in the driver's seat of the Team Australia A1 entry by the sixth round in this third season of the identical international open-wheelers -- billed as the World Cup of Motorsport -- at Sydney's Eastern Creek on February 1-3.

Well it was very quietly announced (very, very quietly, without a car, TV cameras or video presentation) this week that Martin will be Team Oz's driver even sooner, at the fifth round at New Zealand's Taupo circuit next weekend (January 18-20).

It's a natural move, as not only has 23-year-old Martin been very impressive in rookie sessions at recent A1 rounds, but by our reckoning he's the best Aussie open-wheeler talent to have emerged since Mark Webber (about to enter his seventh season in F1), Ryan Briscoe (now driving for Roger Penske in the Indy Racing League), James Courtney (now in V8 Supercar racing), David Besnard (who has never looked as good in V8s), Jason Bright (now with his own V8 team), Marcos Ambrose (now in NASCAR) and Will Power (now in Champ Car).

As much as it is logical for Martin to be in the seat of the A1 team headed by Australia's F1 world champion, Alan Jones (a completely different entity to the Craig Gore-owned Team Australia that races in Champ Car), we gather the changeover from previous driver Ian Dyk has not been seamless -- as much as it was painted as such at this week's announcement.

We'd been hearing that Dyk had a very solid contract, at least up until the Sydney round, and it seems it may have taken something in the order of $200,000 to convince Dyk and his management to forget about the contract.

If correct, we understand that's twice the money Dyk brought to the team at the start of this season to secure the drive.

Alan Jones usually tells it like it is, but he was in full spin mode at the Martin announcement, labouring that Dyk had been magnanimous, honourable, the perfect gentleman in saying he had had his turn in the A1 seat and that it was time for someone else to have a go.

Anyway, the reality is that Martin will be in the car from now on -- largely because of his obvious talent (he was Australia's 2006 Formula Ford champion and won a race in the British FF series, in the Aussie-built Spectrum, at the famous Brands Hatch as soon as he went to England, and now has a season in the British Formula 3 Championship under his belt).

But matters have no doubt been helped along with some contributions from the Martin family fortune built on carting coal at Queensland's Blackwater mines, about 200km west of Rockhampton.

Martin, Team Australia and anyone with the remotest interest in the A1 series will be expecting bigger and better things, certainly than what's been seen to date this season in terms of qualifying positions and race results.

The brief form of Briscoe and Power when they were in A1 with Team Oz will be the benchmarks by which Martin will be judged.

Team Oz has not been making any excuses for its car; indeed in such a heavily-controlled formula there is little room to.

In fact, it reckons the standard of its engineering means the car is almost as well prepared as any out there.

Jones says the team has only had one mechanical failure since inception, and that its pitstops are the fastest of all A1 teams "90 per cent of the time".

So now it's up to Martin to do the business, and start lifting Australia up the rankings from its lowly 17th among 22 countries competing.

In his favour is that he is still eligible to run in rookie sessions for three more rounds, so he will have lots of track time as both rookie and lead driver in NZ, Oz and Durban in South Africa.

Martin says that, while he would love to start winning straight away, up against ex-F1 drivers like India's Narain Karthikeyan and Malaysia's Alex Yoong (who has proved to be considerably better than he appeared in his F1 days), as well as Brit Oliver Jarvis, Irishman Adam Carroll and New Zealander Jonny Reid and a host of other top young talents, aiming for regular top-six positions is more realistic.

Jones says that, in the few opportunities Martin has already had in rookie sessions, he has "grabbed the car by the scruff of the neck and dragged it around".

That was very much Jones' style, so we can envisage new driver and team principal gelling well.

"You can tell (whether a driver is truly quick) within five or six laps," says Jones.

He was impressed that Martin was quick in the A1 rookie sessions in which he has already driven, and that he set quick times straight away.

Jones says it is hard to find good drivers who are consistent and he is wary of expectations now that Martin has been installed.

Knowing that Australia has so many sporting champions, and that the Australian public demands success or doesn't want to know, Jones says, cynically, that even if Team Australia were to win at Eastern Creek there would be questions from the fans about whether it had won by far enough.

For now, we think Aussie motor racing fans will be quite content to see the green and yellow car at the pointy end in qualifying and at the chequered flag.

Martin is now in a pretty handy position.

He has the chance to show his wares in A1, and his other drive this year will be a second season in the British F3 Championship, but rather than expat Aussie Alan Docking's outfit it will be with Raikkonen Robertson Racing.

Yes, that's right, an F3 team partly-owned by Ferrari's F1 world champion Kimi Raikkonen, and his managers Steve Robertson and his father David.

Again that will be requiring a large contribution from the family business, supplemented by some funding from the Australian Motor Sport Foundation.

We have noticed that the Aussies who do best in open-wheeler racing overseas -- like Webber, Bright (whose problem was money, not talent) and Power -- have a particular grit, a special determination, and a clear picture of where they want to go.

Through all the hurdles that confronted him along the way, Webber never lost sight of his burning ambition to race in F1 -- and he got there, even if the results to date have been well short of what everyone had hoped.

For all Martin's talent, the young Queenslander appears a freer spirit, seemingly prepared to see where the journey takes him.

"Maybe one day A1 will be the place to be," Martin says

Last season's A1 champion, German teenager Nico Hulkenberg, is now the Williams F1 test driver.

Jones reckons that -- and again there is a bit of spin in this -- A1 could end up being regarded as the equal of Europe's GP2 series from which Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg and Nelson Piquet Junior have emerged -- as a training ground for F1 drivers.

Martin likes it that the A1 car slides more like a Formula Ford than an F3 machine.

"It talks to you," he says.

The A1 car's behaviour improves the chances of overtaking, Martin says, and that -- despite the well and constantly documented problems of the series gaining traction -- makes it "the most entertaining open-wheeler racing in the world".

He has a point there. Critics would say A1 doesn't have much to beat on that score, certainly with the very limited amount of passing in F1 -- although that situation may improve this year with the outlawing of traction control.

Next weekend in NZ John Martin steps up on to a bigger stage.

A1 may not have been going great guns to date, but certainly in this series he has the opportunity to make a bigger mark than success in British F3 would probably do for him now, despite the camouflage of A1's country-versus-country concept.

It is refreshing to see a young Aussie getting a break like this, even if it has to helped along by substantial private sponsorship.

As much as we enjoy our domestic touring car series, true Australian motor sport fans will always want to see our young drivers take on the world in open-wheelers.

So the best of luck to young John Martin.

Murdoch edges a little closer to F1
Almost 14 months ago we raised here the question of whether Australia's global media magnate Rupert Murdoch might end up owning F1.

That was at the time that Murdoch's British pay-television operation BSkyB, better known simply as Sky, bought an 18 per cent stake in Britain's ITV, the main English-language telecaster of F1, for A$2.3 billion.

Through its various operations around the globe, Murdoch's News Corporation already had F1 broadcast rights in many countries.

We wrote in mid-November 2006: "It makes a lot of sense for F1 to end up being owned or controlled by a media company.

"It is sport and entertainment -- and content for television. Although Bernie Ecclestone remains firmly in control of F1, he is in his late 70s and most of the business is now owned by private equity investors -- who are unlikely to be long-term shareholders.

"Even if the Murdochs never end up owning F1, they might have a big say in who does."

In the big picture, not a lot has changed in the past 14 months -- except that this week we noted that News had bought a 15 per cent stake in Germany's largest pay TV broadcaster Premiere for A$487 million.

Premiere has held some of the rights to broadcast F1 in Germany in recent years alongside free-to-air network RTL.

Who knows what game Rupert Murdoch is playing, but we won't be surprised if -- when Ecclestone's private equity partners decide to bail out, perhaps coinciding with his (Ecclestone) departure from the sport (probably only on death) -- the News group is there to take over F1.

AASA silent, but a move on ARC front
No word yet, surprisingly, on the meeting between the Australian Auto Sport Alliance (AASA) and rally promoters that was scheduled for Sydney on Wednesday and which we previewed in our last motorsport report.

A key rallying source assures us that the absence of an announcement since that meeting is not a negative for the alternative Australian Rally Championship proposed by AASA.

Perhaps the picture will clear by the weekend.

We note, though, that the calendar for the existing ARC has been rejigged this week, with Rally Queensland pushed from March to late June "to condense the previously released calendar which left a two-month gap between rounds three and four".

Our sources tell us, though, that a more likely reason is that Rallycorp has not yet found a replacement national sponsor following NEC's exit -- and that there are other, potentially far bigger financial and administrative problems in the sport.

The change in the calendar means the West Australian round, the Forest Rally, will open the series for the first time since 2004.

The announcement made reference to Rally Queensland returning to its "traditional ARC date in the middle of the year" and said it would include a round of the Queensland Rally Championship and sub-events for Classic, Clubman, Pocket Rocket and Excel series vehicles.

But we hear the move creates problems for the two-year-old Sunshine Coast tarmac rally, which apparently is scheduled for the same weekend.

Who would have thought that rallying, usually the poor relation of motorsport (certainly in the sense of media attention), would have been so much in focus at this time of year. 

Revised 2008 Australian Rally Championship calendar
April 5-6 -- Forest Rally, WA
May 10-11 -- Rally of Canberra
June 21-22 -- Rally Queensland
July 26-27 -- Rally SA
September 20-21 -- Great Lakes Rally, NSW
October 18-19 -- Rally of Melbourne

Image courtesy of Luke West, Auto Action magazine

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