MOTORSPORT: Bathurst 1000 - Christmas for petrolheads

The Bathurst 1000 is the most special race on the Australian motorsport calendar and the dominant driver in V8 Supercar racing of recent years, Jamie Whincup, has captured just how special it is.

As the Great Race nears on Sunday, with practice underway today, Whincup has said that the annual classic at Mt Panorama “has a similar feel to Christmas”.

That it is – for the drivers, for the spectators at The Mountain, and for television viewers around the country.

Bathurst on race morning has a distinctive sense of anticipation and excitement, like kids waiting to discover what Santa Claus has brought them. Although the field these days has just 29 cars, rather than up to 55 of yesteryear (and only Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons), the 49th edition of the Bathurst enduro this Sunday promises to be another very special race.

There is the prospect of rain over each of the four days of the event, including late on Sunday – although a top temperature of 19 degrees is forecast throughout the race.

A splash of rain always spices up a motor race, but hopefully any inclemency late Sunday afternoon won’t be a repeat of 20 years ago when an almighty storm hit The Mountain suddenly and triggered mayhem. That was the year of the first of the Nissan GT-R wins by Mark Skaife and Jim Richards, even though Richards had hit the wall and Dick Johnson and his legion of fans thought he and John Bowe should have been awarded the victory.

On the 30th anniversary of the first of his three Bathurst 1000 successes, Johnson this week has been inducted into the National Motor Museum’s Hall of Champions. Now 66, Johnson is the sixth motorsport identity – joining the late Peter Brock, Jim Richards, Bob Jane, Sir Jack Brabham and Wayne Gardner – to have had a bust sculpted of him by Julie Edgar to stand in the museum at Bathurst.

The irony of Johnson’s career is that it was always his co-drivers who were at the wheel of his Fords when they took the chequered flag in the Great Race – John French in 1981 and John Bowe in 1989 and ’94.

It is only in more recent times that Bathurst has become a round of Australia’s premier national motor racing series – previously the touring car championship, now the V8 Supercar Championship.

Either way though, as Johnson says, winning at Bathurst can make up for a bad year – which is some encouragement to reigning series champion and former Johnson driver James Courtney, who is languishing 17th in the championship since switching to the Holden Racing Team this year.

The Triple Eight Race Engineering Commodores of Craig Lowndes-Mark Skaife and Whincup-Andrew Thompson are the benchmark machines in the field, although Courtney’s HRT teammate Garth Tander has cast doubt on Thompson to hold up his end if it rains on Sunday.

Tander has branded development series leader Thompson “hopeless” in the wet, but such comments can come back to bite. Two-time Bathurst winner Tander has an even less experienced co-driver this year, Nick Percat.

Nonethless, six-time winner Skaife has rated Tander and Percat the main Holden rivals to the Triple Eight entries and New Zealanders Shane Van Gisbergen and John McIntyre the best chance for Ford in a Stone Brothers Falcon.

Skaife said he had been particularly impressed by McIntyre three weeks ago in the Phillip Island 500, which Skaife and Lowndes won. But Stone Bros have not won Bathurst since 1998…

While Skaife classified four entries A-plus, he said there were “effectively a dozen A combinations”.

“Courtney and Cameron McConville will go well and Mark Winterbottom and Steve Richards will go well for FPR [Ford Performance Racing],” Skaife stated.

“I was also impressed by how Luke Youlden went with Will Davison [in the second FPR entry] at Phillip Island."

Davison and Youlden finished third, behind the Triple Eight Holdens.

Skaife continued: “Steve Johnson with David Besnard [in a Dick Johnson Falcon] went missing at Phillip Island, but Steve goes well at Bathurst and David drove very well at The Mountain last year [for Garry Rogers Motorsport].”

Johnson and Besnard may just be the 'smokey' for Sunday. Or Lee Holdsworth and Greg Ritter in a Commodore for Garry Rogers. Or, just perhaps, one of the Kelly Brothers Commodores – more likely that of Rick and Owen Kelly [no relation] than Todd Kelly (turning 32 on race day) and David Russell…

Greg Murphy, in the third of the five cars from the Kelly stable, is a Bathurst specialist and four-time winner of the classic – and he has a well-credentialed co-driver, Alan Simonsen.

So there’s plenty to be excited about.

The tradition of people around the country making it a day in front of the telly watching the Great Race will continue. It’s not quite the drawcard it once was – from an average TV audience of almost 1.5 million viewers in the five major state capital cities in 2002 it had retreated to just a shade more than 1 million last year.

Last weekend’s football finals have raised the bar for Bathurst in the television stakes, with an average 2.595 million in those five capitals for the AFL grand final and 2.027 million for the NRL grand final – and another 700,000 in New Zealand.

Despite the recent ructions in NZ over the future of the V8 Supercar Championship, the Great Race will be telecast across the Tasman. But it is the new live telecast into America on Speed Channel that has V8 Supercar supremo Tony Cochrane as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.

In his inimitably ebullient style, Cochrane told The Australian newspaper this week: “We will be going live into prime-time television on a Saturday in the US and it gives us a chance to show our sport to 84 million subscribers and promotions of the national Fox network.”

The Fox network may have 84 million subscribers but just how many of them will view our Great Race on Speed Channel via Fox on Saturday night [Sunday, Australian time] will be interesting to learn – if we ever get a genuine figure.

NASCAR’s biggest race, the Daytona 500, averaged 15.6 million US viewers on Fox in February, peaked at 19.8 million - and 30.1 million American saw some portion of it, however briefly.

Another hallmark NASCAR race, May's Coca-Cola 600 at night in Charlotte, North Carolina, averaged 7.66 million viewers. That race regularly tops the audience for the country’s open-wheeler classic, the Indianapolis 500, run earlier the same day.

The Brickyard 400, the NASCAR race at Indianapolis two months later, averaged 6.377 million too on the ESPN network. Each of these NASCAR races is part of the 36-round Sprint Cup, arguably the world’s biggest motor racing championship.

NASCAR also has a secondary competition, the Nationwide Series, and a third series, for pick-up trucks or utes – both televised.

The Automobile Racing Club of America runs another form of stock car racing which is partly a training ground for NASCAR and many of its races are screened on Speed. There also is GrandAm, a form of road racing for sports and touring cars run by NASCAR, and which draws a negligible TV audience.

Sources at Fox have indicated they expect this weekend’s Bathurst telecast on Speed to attract about half the audience for a GrandAm telecast – ie: half of a neglible audience.

On our patch Bathurst is big. It’s special. It’s our Great Race. But let’s not start kidding ourselves that it’s going to be drawing anything like the audience in the US of the major Americans races.