MOTORSPORT: Bathurst climbs back up TV mountain

Chaz Mostert and Paul Morris came from last to win the Bathurst 1000, and the Great Race has made a huge comeback on television too over several years now.

The peak audience for Bathurst on Sunday was 3.775 million viewers, according to figures from ratings agency OzTAM.

It's a high note for the Seven network in its last year of telecasting V8 Supercar racing.

Next year the sport goes to pay-TV service Fox, with the Ten network also showing six rounds of the V8 Supercar Championship – including Bathurst – live (and others as packaged-highlight replays) in a six-year, $241 million deal. After the remaining three rounds this year (Gold Coast, Phillip Island and Sydney), Seven will become the telecaster of the rival but smaller-audience Bathurst 12-Hour GT race in February.

Sunday's peak audience for the Bathurst 1000 was 82 per cent of the bumper 4.6 million for the NRL grand final a week earlier.

On the key TV industry measure – the average audience in the five major state capitals (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth) – Sunday's telecast of the race was up almost seven per cent on last year, and 29.1 per cent from the low of 2010.

That average has risen four years in a row now.

Sunday's five-capitals average of 1.351 million was just shy of the 1.357 million in 2007 – the year V8 Supercar racing returned to Seven after a decade on the Ten network.

However, Seven has never topped – in its second stint as the Bathurst 1000 telecaster, after having "made" the event in the 1970s and '80s – the best averages of Ten.

In 2006, just a month after the death of Bathurst's greatest driving legend Peter Brock in a tarmac rally crash in Western Australia, Ten averaged 1.40 million. In 2002 its number was 1.49 million.

Bathurst 1000 five-capitals average viewers on Seven:    
2007    1.357 million
2008    1.249 million
2009    1.182 million
2010    1.046 million
2011    1.212 million
2012    1.253 million
2013    1.263 million
2014    1.351 million

Last Sunday's 1.351 million on Seven came after 2.813 million for the Seven-telecast AFL grand final 15 days earlier and about 2.5 million for the NRL grand final on Nine.

While the 1.351 million was an average for the record-long race, the audience kept rising for the podium presentation and the wrap-up as the telecast "drove" deep into Seven's Sunday night news slot.

Seven said it had a peak metropolitan audience (five capitals) of 2.428 million "with the final 10 minutes of the race delivering an average audience of 2.30 million".

"Seven's marathon coverage of the eight-hour race delivered an average audience of 2.186 million across metropolitan and regional markets," it said.

That 2.186 million represented 55.3 per cent of the NRL final's 3.951 million and 62.2 per cent of the AFL final's 3.513 million – the latter two much shorter events.

Saturday's Top 10 Shootout at Bathurst's Mt Panorama circuit was the second biggest program on Australian TV that day, averaging 848,000 in the five capitals, behind only Seven's 6pm news.

This year's Shootout number was 84,000 – or 11 per cent – up on last year, but 87,000 – or 9.3 per cent – below 2012's Shootout, run earlier in the day than the two since.