MOTORSPORT: Bad, good and wait-and-see news

Teams, events in trouble, but there's upside too
Some disturbing news today, and some positives. And some news which may take some time to assess. Quite some time.

First, briefly, the bad news.

>> A V8 Supercar chief has been declared bankrupt this week, although there is a chance that declaration will be overturned within hours.

>> Still no sign of a buyer for Honda's Formula 1 team, although there is a report of the outfit preparing to test a 2009 car -- perhaps a sign that Honda, reluctantly, is going to continue funding it for the time being, as there is no evidence of a deal for Mercedes-Benz engines having been concluded.

>> It is one month today until the first day of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne and the signs in Albert Park are not good.

>> And the opposition to the revival of Australia's round of the World Rally Championship in northern NSW is getting serious.

And the positives, also briefly for now.

>> Gerhard Berger, one of our favorite F1 identities (although, we admit, not everyones) tips a big year for Red Bull Racing, saying it could even be third in the F1 constructors' championship and that it has the drivers to do the job -- Aussie Mark Webber and German sensation Sebastian Vettel.

>> Two-time world rally champion Marcus Gronholm is making a comeback, although only for one event at this stage.

>> Two-time Australian rally champion Simon Evans, a victim of Toyota's withdrawal from the ARC, is to drive a Mitsubishi Evolution IX for the rest of the season, instead of the Subaru expected.

>> And New Zealand's female rally star, Emma Gilmour, is to do the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship this year with a Singapore-based outfit as teammate to Australia's Cody Crocker.

A couple of other things: the Dakar Rally is to remain in South America next year, and F1's Spygate finally seems to have been concluded, with heavy fines on four McLaren engines that will avert legal action going ahead in Italy.

And those matters which may take quite some time to assess:

>> The men behind the proposed US F1 team have made an announcement, with lots of prospective American drivers mentioned. We admire the optimism of the pair, engineer Ken Anderson and TV commentator Peter Windsor, but wonder at the wisdom of trying to run an outfit out of Charlotte, North Carolina, with a base in Spain and perhaps Danica Patrick in the cockpit -- all on a low budget against teams much longer established and many associated with car manufacturers. There's a lot of talk, and even some decisions, about cutting costs in F1, but we're yet to see whether it eventuates as intended. We doubt it. Certainly to the extent being talked about.

>> Linfox, owner of Victoria's Phillip Island circuit, has plans for a $200 million new F1 circuit at its Avalon Airport near Geelong if the Victorian government is agreeable to a 10-year deal for it once the contract for Melbourne's Albert Park expires in 2015. F1 tsar Bernie Ecclestone, or whoever is running the sport at that time, would also have to agree. A long shot this, with potential for some "head-butting" between Australian Grand Prix Corporation chairman Ron Walker and Linfox chief Lindsay Fox and his son, Andrew.

Now we'll expand on the above. Some in some detail, some with links to reports elsewhere, and some only a little more cursorily.

>> Team Kiwi Racing David John was declared bankrupt in New Zealand last Monday, in his absence.
The High Court in Hamilton, venue for the NZ round of the V8 Supercar Championship, was listed to rehear the case today (Thursday).
TKR's problems have been ongoing ... for years now.
Irrespective of the High Court decision, it seems there will be efforts to keep the team alive and ensure it gets to the opening round of the championship in Adelaide -- and avoid the $200,000 fine that missing it could incur.
Some interesting information is surfacing in NZ, including the involvement in the team of a farmer (yes, farmer!) investor and that the racing licence is owned by a company other than TKR.
More reading from the Waikato Times newspaper is here. The Honda F1 sale saga has become an embarrassment -- for the team, Honda the car company, and F1.
Honda said this week there was no serious buyer in sight.
It has long been known that McLaren and Mercedes-Benz have been prepared to supply engines, but there is apparently a deadline of next Monday on such a deal being finalised.
Perhaps, with just one month to the start of the season and less than three weeks before the cars needed to be packed up to transported to Melbourne, the pendulum is now swinging back towards Honda having no alternative but to fund the team this year until a proper sale can be concluded.
Word now is that technical wizard Ross Brawn may end up as the team chief without incumbent Nick Fry involved.
The usually authorative Autosport magazine's website is reporting that a 2009 Honda F1 car is set to be tested within days, which would indicate much has been happening behind the scenes. That report is here but we remain skeptical. In any case, a car being rolled out at this late stage and coming to Australia without full and proper testing is not the right footing on which to start a season.

>> The Australian GP is on March 26-29, but in light of the Honda debacle, the prospect of only 18 F1 cars on the Melbourne grid if that situation is not resolved, and what's happening in Albert Park the alarm bells are ringing loudly.
In the big picture, the man who heads F1, Bernie Ecclestone, is almost 80 years of age.
The man who heads the organisation that makes and enforces the sport's rules, Max Mosley, is almost 70 years of age.
The man who chairs the Australian promoter and organiser, Ron Walker, is also approaching 70.
The band booked to play a big concert at the end of the Oz GP, The Who, was in its prime 30 years ago.
And now we discover that the BBC, which has regained F1 broadcast rights from ITV and will provide the feed that Australian viewers will see throughout the year, has opted for another dated band Fleetwood Mac's The Chain as its theme music.
All of which leaves us wondering whether F1 is in touch with the now generation.
There are undoubtedly some merits to some of these ageing factors.
Certainly The Who remains hugely popular with people who grew up listening to it/them.
And, love or loathe him, Ecclestone remains a potent force and we have particularly admired his efforts over this off-season to keep F1 in the spotlight -- something from which V8 Supercars could take a lesson.
But you have to wonder about the future of a sport in the hands of such elderly men and hitched to the music of The Who and Fleetwood Mac running/promoting a sport that ought be trying to connect with the modern generation.
Apart from all of that, the signs are not good from Albert Park.
Indications are that the number of grandstand seats for this year's race will be barely half those of a decade ago, while the Australian Grand Prix Corporation and the Victorian government, which underwrites the AGPC's losses ($40 million last year), are admitting that corporate hospitality sales are being hard hit in the economic meltdown.
We hear suggestions that corporate sales may be only 60-70 per cent of what they ought to have been.
Quite a contrast to the Singapore corporate sales scenario we read about here.

The response of the organisers is contained in a press release posted here

We sense that the organisers, while proclaiming that there is majority support for the rally in the area, are starting to get seriously concerned about the opposition with the clock now ticking quickly towards September.

Enough of the negatives. Now some positives.

>> Gerhard Berger -- 10-time GP-winning driver, including twice in Adelaide, a former BMW motorsport chief and until recently half-owner of Scuderia Toro Rosso -- has said he's expecting a big year for Red Bull Racing for which Australia's Mark Webber drives.
"I'm going to stick my neck out a little bit and say Red Bull Racing is my quiet tip for third in the constructors' championship," Berger told Speedweek magazine.
Berger said he was impressed with the team's new RB5 car and its drivers, Webber and Sebastian Vettel, the 21-year-old German who won last year's wet Italian GP for Toro Rosso.
As the then half-owner of that team, Berger shared the victory podium at Monza with Vettel and is known to rate the youngster enormously -- and perhaps will continue to play at part in his career.
"In 2008 Red Bull was already getting its stability well under control. Additionally, they have top drivers. These facts, in combination with a motivated team, point to a good season.
"But it is important to remember that the other teams are not asleep."
That's all a confidence boost that from Berger, in our view a man whose opinion carries weight.
Hope he's right.

 >> Great news for rallying that Finnish two-time world champion Marcus Gronholm is coming out of retirement for Rally Portugal in April.
Like Australia's most successful V8 Supercar driver Mark Skaife, although in different circumstances, Gronholm retired too young.
He will run a 2008 Subaru Impreza WRC car run by Prodrive in Portugal.
He has said it is just a one-off, although he has not ruled out considering a bigger comeback.
The WRC is going to need all the competition it can get, with Citroen superstar having won both rounds so far this season and surely on the way to a sixth straight world title.

>> We're sure we recall hearing that Simon Evans would revert to a Subaru like that of his younger brother Eli following Toyota's withdrawal from the Australian Rally Champonship.
But now comes news that the two-time national champion will contest the rest of this year's ARC in the Mitsubishi Evo IX that Scott Pedder drove in last year's Asia-Pacific Rally Championship.
The first rally for Evans and his co-driver wife Sue in the Evo will be in Canberra on March 7-8, with Eli in his Subaru -- both cars under the Evans family umbrella.
And, as always, Evans S. is upbeat -- not only about himself, but about the ARC.
"There are still more cars contesting the ARC than there are the Carrera Cup -- at least we still have a championship," he said.

>> Top New Zealand rally driver Emma Gilmour has joined Singapore's Motor Image Racing Team for the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship as teammate to Aussie Cody Crocker, who has won a succession of Oz and A-P titles.
In between her A-P commitments, Gilmour will still contest the NZ championship.
She will be the first woman driver in the A-P series, and her first event with Motor Image will be the May 9-10 Rally of Queensland, which has taken Canberra's place as the Oz round of the series.

>> Confirmation this week that the Dakar Rally will remain in South America next year.
It was switched from Africa this year after terrorism fears caused the cancellation of the 2007 Dakar.
The first South American Dakar, in Argentina and Chile, was hailed as a huge success.
Chile reportedly will get more than the five (day) stages it had this year when the event route and schedule are finalised for next year.

>> A quiet conclusion this week to F1's Spygate which took up so much time and energy in 2007 -- and saw McLaren fined US$100 million and stripped of its constructors' championship points that season for obtaining a big dossier of Ferrari technical data.
Four McLaren engineers have been fined a total of about A$800,000 -- former chief designer Mike Coughlan the most, and Paddy Lowe, Jonathan Neale and Rob Taylor an equal lesser amount.
It is understood that Coughlan will have to pay his fine himself but that McLaren will foot the bill for the other trio.
The deal that hopefully brings the whole sorry saga to a close has seen Italian authorities agree to a "nolo contendere" (no contest) in the courts there.

And now to matters on which we will take a wait-and-see stance.

>> Lots of reports around, since the formal announcement yesterday, about the proposed US F1 team we've already mentioned a couple of times here.
Peter Windsor and Ken Anderson claim to have secured the investment and sponsorship they sought for the venture, which hopes to be on the GP grid next year.
And they claim that, as so much technology comes from the US, it will be cheaper to operate from Charlotte with a "landing base" in Spain, that in the more traditional Britain.
And they say it will be a lot cheaper to start from scratch than it would have been to buy an existing time like Honda.
Apart from Danica Patrick, names being mentioned as prospective drivers are NASCAR star Kyle Busch, Marco Andretti, Graham Rahal, Conor Daly, 21-year-old Jonathan Summerton, as well as Scott Speed (who has already failed in F1 and is now in NASCAR) and AJ Allmendinger (also in NASCAR now and third in the recent Daytona 500).
For more on the ambitious venture, we recommend a short Autoweek report here and a longer crash.net report based on an interview with Windsor here.

>> Twenty months ago we wrote here: "A front-page report in the Geelong Advertiser newspaper claims plans are being made for a $200 million motorsport development near the Victorian city -- and near Avalon Airport where the F1 jumbo jets arrive each year for the Melbourne race.
"The Geelong consortium claims to have access to a big pot of foreign money for the project -- and to have its sights set on becoming the new home of the GP.
"It says it is preparing details for the Victorian government and Geelong council and had not intended to go public yet but felt compelled by the talk of a Sydney play for the GP with, supposedly, a chunk of the new NSW major events company's $85 million-a-year budget."
Our full commentary from 20 months ago is contained in this link here.
We mention our earlier report because this week Auto Action magazine's editor-at-large Mark Fogarty has revealed a whole lot more detail about this plan -- and it involves transport magnate Linday Fox's Linfox company, which already owns the Phillip Island circuit, rather than Asian money.
In a report on page 4 of AA's issue 1329 Fogarty writes:
"A $200 million Formula One track could be built at Avalon Airport outside Melbourne if the Victorian government needed an affordable alternative to the Albert Park street course.
"Phillip Island International Circuit owner Linfox has revealed a secret feasibility study into a motorsport complex at Avalon capable of hosting the Australian Grand Prix.
"Linfox would be prepared to build the F1 circuit in partnership with the Victorian government if the state secured a 10-year extension of its contract for the AGP."
Linfox director Andrew Fox, son of Lindsay, admitted that a permanent venue away from Melbourne could not match Albert Park's location and look, but he said: "I believe this is a financially viable solution."
Fox said Linfox would be prepared to inject its capital if there could be "a win-win-win".
"If there is ever a need for permanent circuit, we have a viable option," Fox said.
The Linfox proposal is for a 5km circuit in the south-east corner of the airport and based on the Bernie Ecclestone-owned Paul Ricard track in France.
With losses at Albert Park now running at $40 million a year and likely to balloon this year, perhaps to $50 million or more, because of the sharp downturn in sales in the economic meltdown, a permanent circuit makes a lot of sense.
But critics of temporary circuits might well ask, by 2016, why it took so long for common sense to prevail.