MOTORSPORT: Big award for Briscoe

Ryan Briscoe wins Bruce McLaren Trophy
Australian racing driver Ryan Briscoe has won one of motorsport's most prestigious awards -- the Bruce McLaren Trophy.

Briscoe, 26, of Sydney, will receive the trophy -- for the most meritorious performance by a Commonwealth driver this year -- at the Autosport awards in London on December 4.

Briscoe finished fifth in the world's biggest motor race, the Indianapolis 500, in May and was rookie-of-the-year in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS).

The McLaren trophy is named in honour of the late New Zealander who founded the McLaren team that had huge success in Formula 1 and American sports car and open-wheeler racing in the 1970s and '80s.

The trophy is awarded by the British Racing Drivers' Club.

The BRDC awarded Bruce McLaren a trophy in 1965 which, after his death while testing one of his CanAm sports cars at Britain's old Goodwood circuit in 1970, his wife presented back to the club to become an annual award to the best Commonwealth driver racing internationally each year.

Australia's last F1 world champion, Alan Jones, won the trophy six times -- from 1975 through until his 1980 world title season -- and Mark Webber has won it four times in the past decade.

Briscoe will be the ninth Australian to receive the McLaren trophy.

It was announced earlier this month that he will drive full-time in the Indy Racing League (IRL) next year for American billionaire Roger Penske, the most successful team owner in the history of the Indy 500 with 14 victories.

Briscoe's fifth place in this year's Indy 500 came in a satellite team run by Penske's son, Jay.

In the ALMS sportscar series he drove a Porsche Spyder for Penske, winning three of the 12 rounds with German co-driver Sascha Maassen -- and they were runners-up in the series.

Briscoe has raced overseas since his early teens, mainly in open-wheelers, but joined the Holden Racing Team for the 2006 V8 Supercar endurance races, the Sandown 500 and Bathurst 1000, stunning the local motor sport fraternity by taking provisional pole position on his debut at Sandown.

His most emphatic success was winning the European Formula 3 Championship with Italian-based Prema Powerteam, which catapulted him into an F1 testing role with Toyota.

By late 2004 he was Toyota's reserve driver in F1 and driving in Friday practice sessions at grands prix, consistently near the top of the timesheets.

When Toyota signed Ralf Schumacher and Jarno Trulli for the 2005 season Briscoe could have had an F1 drive with the Jordan or Minardi teams, if he had taken sponsorship to them, but took up an offer to drive in the IRL for Chip Ganassi Racing.

Although Ganassi's Toyota-powered cars that year were thrashed by rival Honda-engined cars, Briscoe scored a pole position and led two races before a fiery -- and now famous -- crash at Chicagoland Speedway left him in hospital for weeks.

He became a "freelancer" in 2006, competing variously in Champ Car, the IRL, the global A1 Grand Prix series -- and with HRT on Australian soil for the first time since his childhood days racing karts.

At Penske Racing now, he has replaced triple IRL series champion and Indy 500 winner Sam Hornish Junior, who has switched to NASCAR racing.

Briscoe's teammate next season is Brazilian Helio Castroneves, who has already won the Indy 500 twice for Penske and was third this year -- behind Italo-Scotsman Dario Franchitti and New Zealander Scott Dixon.

Apart from the 16-round IRL series, Briscoe is likely to drive in America's two biggest sports car races -- the Daytona 24-hour and Sebring 12-hour.

The Indy 500 is the centerpiece in the IRL series, and Briscoe's fifth place last May was the third best finish in the classic by an Australian in its 91-year history -- bettered only by Vern Schuppan's third in 1981 and Geoff Brabham's fourth in 1983.

Schuppan and Brabham also are among the nine Australians now to have won the Bruce McLaren Trophy.

Almost 40 years after his death, McLaren remains an outstanding role model in motorsport -- something of a Kiwi Jack Brabham.

McLaren overcame polio as a boy, tinkered with cars in his father's garage, won a trip to Europe as a rising star driver, joined Brabham at the old Cooper factory team and won the United States GP in 1959 at 22 years and 80 days -- becoming the youngest F1 winner until Fernando Alonso broke that record in 2003.

McLaren also won the Le Mans 24-hour sports car classic in a Ford GT40, but it was as a constructor that he had begun to make his mark on the world before his untimely death.

A movie is now being made about McLaren's life, with the producer being Barrie M. Osborne, who produced The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix and The Big Chill.

Ryan Briscoe has a lot of McLaren's modest personality about him, but no signs yet of the urge to become a constructor.

But why would you need to when you have a race seat with Roger "The Captain" Penske, whose quest for success and perfection would have been a match for any F1 team had he chosen to pursue it consistently on the European side of the Atlantic.

A dozen big NASCAR races for Ambrose
It's a good week for Australians racing overseas, with confirmation of something we reported on here some time ago -- that Marcos Ambrose would get to drive a dozen races next year in NASCAR's premier division for his existing team, Wood Brothers Racing/JTG Racing.

It will mean an even more hectic schedule for the dual Australian V8 Supercar champion in America, as he will continue to drive the whole 35-round second-tier championship, which -- because of a sponsorship change -- will become the Nationwide Series (previously Busch). The premier Nextel Cup becomes the Sprint Cup, following the Sprint company's takeover of Nextel.

Ambrose will drive Ford Fusions in each series, with continuing support from Ford but different sponsorships on the cars.

While the NASCAR season begins in February, Ambrose's Sprint Cup drives won't start until mid-June at the Sonoma road course in California -- where he was originally scheduled to have made his big-league debut this year.

Two other drivers are expected to drive the Cup car during the season, but no announcement has been made about them yet -- although one is expected to be Jon Wood, a member of the co-ownership family.

Ambrose finished eighth in this year's Busch series, which ended last weekend at Homestead in Florida, and was the second top rookie, behind David Ragan.

Juan Pablo Montoya was rookie-of-the-year in the Nextel Cup and finished 20th overall in that championship.

Ambrose has said of his part-time elevation: "The Busch Series is tough. Cup is another level again.

"I'm confident we can achieve some good things in these 12 Cup races. I've always enjoyed running in Busch races when there were a lot of Cup guys running as well because you had a benchmark and you could compare yourself to them."

Massive field for mammoth Dakar Rally
At a launch this week for the 30th Dakar Rally, organisers promised "an ocean of sand".

A record 570 teams from 50 countries are entered for the event, to be run over 9273km -- 5736 km of it in 15 special stages -- from the January 5 start in Lisbon, Portugal, to the January 20 finish in Dakar, Senegal.

A 1500km monster stage is scheduled in Mauritania, but potentially dangerous areas such as Mali have been omitted because the organisers say "it is simply too complicated to organise a Dakar through such regions".

The overall distance is 1500km longer than this year.

After two special stages in Portugal, the rally will spend four days in Morocco, followed by eight stages in Mauritania before reaching Senegal.

Registered starters include 205 cars, 245 bikes, 20 quads and 100 trucks from 60 teams more than this year.

Mitsubishi will be aiming for an eighth win in a row in the car division, spearheaded by three-time winner Stephane Peterhansel and fellow-French 2006 champion Luc Alphand, while Volkswagen is aiming to make it to the top of the podium for the first time.

A gentler pace - A1 GP and Classic Adelaide
After last weekend's V8 Supercars, WRC in Ireland, Macau GP and World Touring Car Championship final (in Macau, where British ace Andy Priaulx clinched his third straight title), a quieter weekend of motorsport coming up, with the main events being the third round of the A1 GP series at Sepang in Malaysia and the Classic Adelaide Rally.

Britain's Lord Paul Vestey has brought out his unique 1959 Ferrari California Spider for Classic Adelaide, which gets underway today (Thursday).

There will be 34 special stages through until Sunday, with a field of 260 cars built between 1920 and 1990.

Lord Vestey's car is the only survivor of two special competition models of the California roadster built for competition by the Ferrari factory.

It once won the GT class at the Sebring 12-Hour.

In Classic Adelaide's competition category South Australian Rex Broadbent is trying for a sixth straight win in his Porsche 911 RS and eight-time Targa Tasmania champion Jim Richards trying for his first in a Porsche 944 Turbo Cup.

The A1 GP series will chalk up its 50th race this round, and the young man to watch for is Englishman Oliver Jarvis -- who won last weekend's Macau F3 GP.

Jarvis also won the opening A1 feature race this season at Zandvoort in Holland and has recently tested a GP2 car and a McLaren-Mercedes F1 car.

A1 has had a five-week break since its second round in the Czech Republic.

New Zealand, with Jonny Reid back in the car for this round, leads South Africa by one point, with Great Britain third.

Championship defender Germany has a new driver in Malaysia -- Michael Ammermuller.

Malaysia's Alex Yoong is the most experienced driver in A1GP and, despite his very modest form in F1 and failure to make any impression in V8 Supercars, he has blossomed in this formula.

The next round will be at Zhuhai in China.