MOTORSPORT: F1, V8 Supercar bombshells

Daniel Ricciardo from Perth will make his F1 race debut at next weekend's British Grand Prix. And V8 Supercars has signed a five-year deal to run a round of its championship at the new Texas circuit being built to host F1 and MotoGP. It's mega news on both counts, but we need to keep our feet firmly on the ground -- for reasons we'll come to a little later.

Ricciardo turns 22 today and has received the dream gift -- his GP race debut at Silverstone, a race fellow Australian Mark Webber won last year. The shock is that Ricciardo will be driving with the Hispania team. His long-time backer Red Bull has arranged for Ricciardo, who has been the reserve driver for its world champion team Red Bull Racing and smaller outfit Scuderia Toro Rosso, to race for Hispania for the rest of the F1 season.

He has driven in the 90-minute Friday morning practice sessions at every GP this year for Toro Rosso and at the end of the past two seasons topped official tests of youngsters on the cusp of F1 -- firstly at Jerez in Spain and then at Abu Dhabi -- driving Red Bull cars.

Ricciardo will become the first West Australian to race in a GP and, provided he qualifies and lines up on the same grid as Webber at Silverstone, it will be the first time since the 1980s that Australia has had two representatives in a GP.

A WA karting champion as a boy, Ricciardo commuted from Perth to compete -- while still a teenager -- in the Formula BMW Asia Championship in the middle of last decade.

From there he moved to Formula Renault in Italy and then, once Red Bull spotted him, throughout Europe, winning the West European title in 2008 and finishing runner-up in the Euroseries. Then he won the British Formula Three Championship in 2009 and last year was runner-up in the World Series by Renault for 3.5-litre openwheelers.

He is now in Budapest for this weekend's round of that series -- in which he has already won two races, including at Monaco for the second year in a row -- and will continue in it for the rest of the year.

Of his F1 promotion Ricciardo said: "It's a dream come true for me -- for the first time on an F1 starting grid!

"I had to pinch myself a couple of times to be sure that it's real... "I'm excited and can hardly wait to drive at Silverstone.

"It's a new challenge, a new experience, a new team, but I'm ready and will give my best."

Of Silverstone he said: "It's a circuit I know well and it's just up the road from my second home (in Milton Keynes, also home to Red Bull Racing)."

Hispania is in its second season and, to put it mildly, is struggling. It's yet to score a world championship point in 1.5  years.

Ricciardo is replacing Narain Karthikeyan, although it seems the Indian will fill the seat for the new Indian GP at the end of October.

While it is great news that another Australian has made F1 the reason we need to keep our feet on the ground is that, with Hispania, Ricciardo is not going to be in contention to win races and is unlikely even to be in the points.

Hispania is the modern equivalent of the old Minardi, constantly fighting to survive let alone become competitive. It should be a great learning experience for Ricciardo but, for now, he can do little more than compare favourably with Hispania teammate Vitantonio Liuzzi.

The West Australian will do well to qualify close to Italian Liuzzi's times and, if he finishes races, it may well be two, three or four laps down.

Ricciardo's target needs to be prove that he's worth the Toro Rosso race drive he's already pretty much assured of next year -- and worthy of Red Bull's continuing support, with the ultimate aim of filling one of the seats now occupied by Sebastian Vettel and Mark Webber.

It is incredible that Cochrane has been able to "sell" V8 Supercars to the Americans -- and so soon. It is part of the plans to expand the championship to 18 rounds, with six outside Australia and New Zealand. And it comes just a month after the success in selling 60 per cent of V8 Supercars Australia to private equity firm Archer Capital -- a deal that valued the "show" at $300 million.

However, the 5.5km Texas track isn't yet finished, there are still some doubts it will be, and certainly there is massive controversy over the prospect of taxpayer funding going into racing there -- primarily for F1.

And already we note a serious contradiction. The announcement from V8 Supercars pronounces: "First-ever LIVE broadcast from USA for any Australian motorsport -- LIVE coverage on SPEED in North and South America."

Yet the Austin-based American Statesman publication says this: "Cable channel Speed currently broadcasts the races about a week after they're run, on Saturday afternoons.

"The network does not have plans in place for coverage of an Austin race, spokesman David Harris said. "We haven't talked about it... That doesn't mean we won't do it, it just hasn't been discussed because it's a new race."

Quite different tales on the TV picture told by that publication and V8 Supercars Australia. Of course, if the Austin circuit eventuates and V8 Supercars race there it most likely will be on Speed Channel.

Whether those races are shown live on Speed might be another matter entirely. And what would any major announcement be without a politician saying something ridiculous?

Queensland premier Anna Bligh demonstrated during the Gold Coast's A1 GP fiasco a couple of years back her poor understanding of motorsport. And in this announcement regarding Texas she has called "V8 Supercars a home-grown Queensland success story".

Isn't V8 Supercars just the modern incarnation of the Australian Touring Car Championship, which began at Orange, NSW, 51 years ago and grew on the back of a great race, indeed The Great Race, on a mountain at Bathurst, also in NSW? And aren't there rounds of this championship in every state in the country, even if the Tasmanian round is under a new cloud? Isn't it just that the offices of V8 Supercars Australia are on the Gold Coast and some teams based there and thereabouts?

Amid the understandable excitement at the prospect of Australia's premier series going to America, it also is worth remembering that two overseas venues that have hosted V8 Supercars in recent years -- Bahrain and Shanghai -- are no longer doing so. And rumblings out of New Zealand suggest that the future of the annual Hamilton street race is far from secure.

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