MOTORSPORT: D-days loom in open-wheeler worlds

Friday motorsport report

October 16, 2009

A couple of big questions to be answered over the next two or three days -- can Jenson Button clinch the Formula One world championship in Brazil; and will the A1 GP cars arrive for next week's Gold Coast SuperGP?

A podium finish for Button at Interlagos in Sao Paulo on Monday morning, Australian time, would make him Britain's 10th F1 world champion; and turn the no-expense-spared new Abu Dhabi grand prix two weeks later into an anti-climax. Meantime the SuperGP could become a massive shambles if the A1 GP cars do not come. We have felt the odds were slightly in favour of them getting here from Britain -- even if not until the middle of next week -- but latest reports we're hearing today suggest otherwise.

In other news, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation's annual report released yesterday reveals that, despite slashing several million dollars from its spending, the expenditure on Melbourne's F1 grand prix is now more than twice the revenue. Hardly a template for a successful business.

Locally, V8 Supercars Australia is on the front foot now about the Bathurst TV picture. And, at last, some genuine hope that Australia's top rally driver Chris Atkinson will return to the World Rally Championship next year. That hope is based on a report by Britain's Autosport that Atkinson has been lined up as teammate to American rally and extreme sports star Ken Block in a new Ford team backed by an energy drink. Check out our story on the new team here.

Pressing the button on world championship climax
Thunderstorms are forecast for the entire weekend of the Brazilian GP, which will only add to the excitement and intrigue of the potentially world title-deciding race.

Jenson Button starts the race with 85 points -- 14 more than his BrawnGP teammate Rubens Barrichello. Sebastian Vettel is another two points behind, needs to win the final two races of the season to have any realistic chance of becoming the youngest F1 world champion, and is counting on assistance from his Australian teammate Mark Webber, who hasn't scored a point in the past five GPs.

Button will clinch the title on Monday morning if he finishes third in the case of Barrichello winning, and by coming fifth if 22-year-old Vettel wins again -- as the German wonderboy did in Japan two weeks ago.

Button won six of the first seven GPs of the season (one more victory than Lewis Hamilton scored on the way to last year's title) but in the second half of the season has limped towards the crown. He has finished on the podium only once in the last eight races –second at the Italian GP in mid-September. The Briton has failed to finish any better than fifth since then and been constantly outperformed lately by veteran teammate Barrichello, who has won twice in the past five races and is now confirmed to be negotiating a transfer to the Williams team next season.

Interlagos is a fabulous anti-clockwise, undulating, bumpy, low-grip circuit next to a Sao Paulo slum, but has a history of producing terrific racing. It's well worth setting the alarm clock -- even more so if it's going to be a wet race.

Japan's Kamui Kobayashi will make his GP debut there for Toyota because German Timo Glock is not fully recovered from his cracked vertebra and leg injury from his crash on the Saturday of the Japanese GP. Kobayashi is 23 and his only serious F1 experience was a run in practice at Suzuka two weeks ago.

As much as Button will be keen to seal the world title at Interlagos that would be contrary to the commercial interests of F1 ringmaster Bernie Ecclestone, who has enticed Abu Dhabi to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on its Yas Marina circuit for its season-ending F1 debut in a fortnight.

"I would like to see him (Button) do me a big favour and get the world championship clinched in Abu Dhabi, but if he can't wait I understand that," Ecclestone told London's The Times this week.

"But who knows what's going to happen?"

In F1, too right.

Super shambles loom on the Gold Coast
Less than a week before it is to get underway, the Gold Coast's SuperGP is verging on farce, with the uncertainty growing over whether the A1 GP open-wheeler cars will be on the grid.

While A1 boss Tony Teixeira vowed early in the week that his show would front and cars representing 17 to 19 countries in the supposed "World Cup of Motorsport" have been pledged, doubts about their arrival have escalated. They were supposed to be leaving Britain today (Friday, Oct 16) to be on the ground in time for a test session at Ipswich's Queensland Raceway on Monday.

Brisbane Airport spokesman Jim Carden has said the airport is not expecting any Boeing 747s over the weekend carrying the A1 cars.
"It is a fairly rare event to have this kind of cargo and we would need to be notified because they would require our services and ground staff," Carden said.

There also is confusion about a safety modification supposedly needed on the A1 cars to add side intrusion protection. A1 Team Australia chairman Alan Evans has said the modification needs to be done and cleared by the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) before the cars leave Britain -- and that that could take four days.

Evans apparently is a director of CAMS, the Confederation of Australian Motorsport, but CAMS chief executive Graham Fountain has said the modification does not have to be done before the cars are flown but before they run on the streets of Surfers Paradise. And SuperGP chief executive Greg Hooton said it did not need to be done until the end of the year.

Hooton's view rings truest with us, but we're not convinced he's right. Indeed, Hooton made a much broader but very unusual statement in the Gold Coast pitlane yesterday afternoon.

"I need to make it clear that this event is happening next week," he said.

"Do not lose sight of the fact that I'm standing in V8 pitlane, where next week the V8 Supercars will for the first time ever have two, 200km races. The V8 Supercars are absolutely a major aspect of this event and will be here in force next week.

"There are certainly rumours surrounding the appearance of the A1 GP World Cup of Motorsport at the Nikon SuperGP at this time --there is no question about that. At this point in time, I need to make clear that A1 GP has not breached any terms of contract with GCMEC (Gold Coast Motor Events Company, a partnership between the Queensland government and sports marketing company IMG).

"The situation is as follows: Operational staff within A1 GP continue to work with our staff on preparing for their race. A1 GP have [sic] released their [sic] teams list. I have letters from the competing teams committing to racing on the Gold Coast. A1GP have paid deposits on accommodation. A1GP have paid deposits on the hire of general equipment. A1GP have approved and completed their on-track signage. Where necessary, A1GP Teams have been making visa applications.

"They (A1GP) have released their 2009-10 series calendar and yesterday further released details on their next round in Zhuhai (in China), which will follow our round.

"They have had their series rules for racing approved. They have provided a provisional driver listing to us but under their rules of racing this in fact can change up until the Wednesday before the event and in fact driver changes can occur between races within an event.

"A1 GP are responsible for their own freight bookings and movement to ensure the cars are here for racing next Thursday.

"The taxpayer has not lost money, nor does the taxpayer face any risk of losing money at this event. This event, as has been stated previously, is completely underwritten by IMG."

Clearly the fallback position if the A1 cars don't make it is for the V8 Supercars to play an even bigger role in the event -- this time at least, although the Queensland government has always insisted it wants an international category as part of the carnival.

The Gold Coast Bulletin reports Queensland premier Paul Lucas is threatening legal action against A1 if it does not turn up. The question that might very soon be put to the Queensland government is how much has been paid already to A1 -- and, in view of the category's well-documented woes, why.

Numbers games GP people play
Miracles do happen... After countless media reports over recent months that the loss on this year's Melbourne's F1 GP would top $50m, the annual report of the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, released Thursday, states it at $40.230m. Not only is that well short of $50m but only $94,000 more than on last year's GP. However, we note that $4.137m has already been hoisted on to next year's accounts.

While Victorian auditor-general DDR Pearson has signed off on the accounts, some minds might reasonably add the $40.230m and $4,137m together to get $44.367m.

The most disturbing figures in the latest report are that -- despite slashing $7.846m out of the cost of running this year's race -- the total expenditure on last March's event, at $75.547m, was more than double the total revenue ($35.317m). That revenue was down from $43.257m last year and $52.633m in 2005.

These numbers are getting very ugly -- and from a corporation chaired by Ron Walker with John Harnden as its deputy chairman and business luminaries James Strong, Alan Oxley, Patrick Flannigan, Gillian Franklin, Laura Anderson, William Bowness and Ken Ryan around the board table.

And despite a second successive loss of more than $40m a note to the financial statements shows that $151,286 was paid to executives in bonuses.

The highest-paid executive, on a salary between $320,000 and $330,000, presumably CEO Drew Ward, looks to have received a bonus of at least $30,000.

If Melbourne talkback radio is a barometer of public sentiment we sense enormous dismay and cynicism about this report today, although neither Walker nor Ward were making themselves available to the station this author was listening to this morning.

Another matter which may become a point of some interest is Walker's remark in his chairman's report that staging this year's race at twilight produced "enormous benefits to Melbourne and Victoria".

Walker claimed the twilight race "generated the largest European broadcast audience ever for an Australian Grand Prix with audiences nearly tripling in size".

"In the United Kingdom the live coverage attracted 56 per cent of Britain's television audience while France peaked at 46.5%. Germany and Italy also obtained approximately 50% of the television audience in the big emerging markets of Russia, China, East Asia and the sub-continent, in particular India with a potential audience of some three billion people not previously available to us," Walker stated.

Now what readers may notice in these remarks is that there is no attribution or verification of the percentages and no actual audience figures. In the key western Europe the Melbourne race time moved from pre-dawn to breakfast time.

What Walker's comments about the European countries hint at, if right, is the low base the numbers were coming off anyway, but we would still like to see authentication of them.

This author recalls researching some European television numbers in about April and forming an impression that the live telecast in Britain, the home of reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton and this year's Melbourne winner Jenson Button, did not get a bigger audience than the year before, although an afternoon replay -- once the British public knew Button had won -- did. Another impression the author recalls getting was that the following Malaysian GP benefited much more, in the international TV context, from its twilight start -- despite that race being cut short by torrential rain.

Interestingly, Malaysia is reverting to an early start time next season.

Was that peak or pique?
Midweek we reported (see here) that, while the Bathurst 1000 telecast still dominated television last Sunday, the audience for the Great Race has been shrinking since V8 Supercar racing has been on the Seven Network from 2007.

The conclusion was based on the OzTAM average audience figures for the five mainland Australian capital cities contained in Seven's press releases following the past three Bathurst 1000s. Such average audience numbers are the industry norm in comparisons to ensure apples are always being compared with apples.

The day after our report V8 Supercars Australia issued a press release headed 'Bathurst a huge ratings winner' and concentrating on peak figures and what it called 'reach' numbers -- and drawing comparison with other sports. It's not clear whether the V8SA announcement was an attempt to rebut our report or purely coincidental.

Either way V8SA claimed to have achieved a wider audience reach than rugby league's State of Origin series and NRL grand final and a virtually identical audience reach to the AFL grand final. For the record, the V8SA announcement is here.

As we pointed out on Wednesday, Bathurst still dominates television on its day -- and V8SA is entitled to leverage that as best it can. But there are a couple of odd things in this week's happenings. For whatever reason, Seven's post-Bathurst release on Sunday's audience does not appear to have been loaded on to its sevencorporate.com.au website under 'Media Releases' as normal. And the V8SA announcement appears to have been prepared in such haste it forgets to tell us who it is quoting -- at least the first three times. Later it attributes things to "Mr Cochrane" -- obviously V8SA executive chairman Tony Cochrane.

Perhaps Tony was talking so fast at first that he forgot who he was. Or perhaps when telling us that V8 Supercars on television are "just as popular in Davenport as we are in Darwin or in Broome as we are in Brisbane" he may have meant Devonport, Tasmania, 7310, rather than Davenport, WA, 6230.

It's in a fast game but perhaps V8 Supercars ought hasten a little more slowly...

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