MOTORSPORT: Hold those horses for now

Mark Webber won’t be racing in the Bathurst 12-Hour next February. Perhaps in 2015.

Chris Atkinson won’t be returning to the World Rally Championship full-time next year, although he may get to drive for Hyundai’s new team at the Monte Carlo Rally in mid-January.

James Courtney won’t be racing at next week’s Sydney 500. Nick Percat will substitute for Courtney in the Holden Racing Team at the V8 Supercar season finale – and drive a fourth HRT entry in next year’s championship.

And Ross Brawn won’t be team principal of Mercedes in Formula One next year.

But James Moffat will race his third make of touring car within a year – a Holden – in New Zealand this weekend.

Moffat, a Nissan driver in V8 Supercars this year after joining it from Dick Johnson’s Ford team, has teamed up with young Kiwi Scott McLaughlin for the Pukekohe 500, the final round of NZ’s V8 SuperTourer Championship.

McLaughlin is the reigning champion in that series but standing only seventh this season.

Falcon-driving accountant Ant Pedersen leads the championship by 90 points from Greg Murphy, winner of the season’s sprint title, ahead of this weekend’s round comprising a 35-lap race Saturday and two 70-lap races Sunday – with refueling introduced for the first time in the longer races.

Moffat replaced Jonathon Webb as McLaughlin’s co-driver, Pederson is partnered by Chaz Mostert, Murphy by Jack Perkins and third-placed Shane Van Gisbergen, in a Falcon, by Alex Davison.

Among other Australians competing there, Warren Luff is partnering John McIntyre in a Ford.

Meanwhile, it was revealed mid-week that James Courtney’s tibia in his right leg was fractured in last Saturday’s collision with fellow Commodore driver Alex Premat at Victoria’s Phillip Island.

That injury has sidelined the 2010 V8 Supercar champion from next weekend’s Sydney 500, with Nick Percat -- HRT’s 2011 Bathurst 1000 winning co-driver with Garth Tander – to deputise for Courtney.

HRT also has announced today that it will field a fourth Commodore full-time next season for Percat as teammate to Tander, Courtney and Tim Slade, who has been recruited from the Erebus Mercedes outfit to replace retiring Russell Ingall.

Percat will race next year on an entry by James Rosenberg, Slade’s long-time backer.

Ryan Walkinshaw, chairman of Walkinshaw Racing that is the business behind HRT, said that running four cars “clearly makes more sense for our business and gives us a greater opportunity as a group to win races”.

The hands-on chief of HRT next season will be Adrian Burgess, who departed Roland Dane’s Triple Eight Race Engineering in the middle of this year when news broke of his intention to switch.

Burgess previously guided Courtney to his V8 Supercar title at Dick Johnson Racing.

Australia’s retired F1 star Mark Webber has reiterated that V8 Supercars, and in particular the Bathurst 1000, are not on his radar, but there was a lot of fuss this week that Webber might race in February’s Bathurst 12-Hour.

It quickly became clear though that it won’t be next year’s half-day enduro at Mt Panorama but rather 2015 – in a Porsche 911 GT3 with movie star Eric Bana and Olympic rowing multiple gold medalist James Tomkins.

Bana has some form in the 12-hour, having raced in it twice and finished 10th outright and sixth in class in 2000 in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evo X -- with Tim Leahey and Peter Hill – while Tomkins won the celebrity race at the Australian Grand Prix in 2004 and ’05.

While Webber will be a Porsche driver in international sports car competition next year, any Bathurst campaign will be more Hollywood than a serious tilt at outright honours.

Hyundai this week named 32-year-old Finn Juho Hanninen as the first of the drivers who may rotate through the driver’s seat of its second i20 in next year’s World Rally Championship as teammate to the Belgian ace Thierry Neuville.

Hanninen, a former Intercontinental Rally Challenge and Super 2000 WRC champion, will compete at the second round of the championship in Sweden in early February, leaving open the possibility that Australia’s Chris Atkinson could fill the seat at the Monte Carlo Rally in mid-January.

Atkinson, who turns 34 this weekend, has been out of a full-time WRC drive since Subaru’s factory team folded at the end of 2008.

However, he has become an Asia-Pacific rally champion since then and in recent months has been heavily involved in Hyundai’s test program with Hanninen and European Rally Championship frontrunner Bryan Bouffier.  

Atkinson finished third in ‘The Monte’ in ’08, the year he also was second in Rally Mexico and Rally Argentina.

Hyundai’s main man for its first WRC campaign in a decade, Neuville, has been recruited from the M-Sport Ford team with which he was runner-up in this year’s WRC to Volkswagen’s new French world champion Sebastien Ogier.

“A number of drivers will share the second i20 WRC throughout 2014. An announcement on who will be Thierry Neuville’s teammate at Rallye Monte Carlo will be made in due course,” Hyundai motorsport boss Michel Nandan said.

Mercedes has given the leadership of its motorsport program its second shake-up in a year, despite jumping from fifth to second in this year’s Formula One constructors’ championship.

The vastly experienced and successful Ross Brawn is departing because of the German company’s wish to split the team principal duties.

Toto Wolff, brought in from the Williams team a year ago to replace long-time Mercedes motorsport chief Norbert Haug, will be the business director of Mercedes in F1 while Paddy Lowe, formerly of McLaren, will be technical director.

Team chairman Niki Lauda said he tried to persuade Brawn to stay but that “you cannot hold somebody back when they have chosen to move on”.

Brawn said the end of F1’s V8 era and the introduction of 1.6-litre turbocharged V6s next season was the right time to exit.

“The team is uniquely positioned to succeed in 2014 and I am proud to have helped lay the foundations for that success,” Brawn said.

Brawn was involved in all seven of Michael Schumacher’s world titles with Benetton and Ferrari, guided the team he took over from Honda for 2009 and Jenson Button to world titles that season, and then Nico Rosberg to a first victory for Mercedes in last year’s Chinese GP.

Now that Brawn’s long-speculated exit from Mercedes has been confirmed there will be even greater attention on where he will surface next.

Most favored is that he will join Honda in its return to F1 in 2015 as engine supplier to McLaren, while there also has been talk of a return to Ferrari or even a position at the world governing body of motorsport, Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).

However, the most appropriate role for him would be to prepare to succeed Sir Frank Williams as team principal and perhaps owner of Williams, the once-mighty outfit that scored only five world championship points this year.

McLaren, a great rival of Williams, which also was only a shadow of its former self this year, also might have an opening for a new principal before long.

Even though his call in dragging Michael Schumacher out of retirement for Mercedes in 2010 did not produce another victory for the 91-time GP winner in three years, Brawn is too good a man to be away from F1 for too long.

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