MOTORSPORT: Homebush D-day imminent

Sydney street race decision likely this week
It may be a watershed week in Australian motorsport.

A decision on whether a V8 Supercar street race will be allowed at Sydney's Homebush Olympic precinct could come by the end of the week.

But before we get into that there's great news from the US today -- Sydney's Ryan Briscoe has won his second IndyCar round of the season with Team Penske, at the Mid-Ohio road course, ahead of his Brazilian teammate Helio Castroneves, with Aussie Kiwi Scott Dixon third and Toowoomba's Will Power fourth.

And Melbourne youngster James Davison won the Indy Lights round there, in appalling conditions and after recovering from 18th place.

But back home V8 Supercars Australia head honcho Tony Cochrane has almost staked the future of touring car racing in this country on Homebush. Without it, he insists, there will be no round of the championship in Australia's biggest city, because he is adamant they not return to Eastern Creek -- and Oran Park will be gone next year.

No Sydney round would be almost suicide for V8 Supercar racing. Cochrane says he is "holding out great hope" of a green light from the NSW government for Homebush, "but it's a 50-50 decision".

We doubt Cochrane would have staked so much on this concept, and be insisting the V8s won't go back to the Creek, unless he had very strong grounds for believing that the government will see things his way on Homebush.

There has been a lot of resistance to the idea within the bureaucracy of the NSW government -- and there remains a lot of opposition from various Homebush stakeholders.

And, even though V8SA is offering to pick up a lot of the cost of getting an event off the ground there, there are big issues about the viability of it -- as there are with all street races.

Cochrane is saying that a thumbs down from the NSW governing in the next few days won't stop him fighting to get his pet project up in the end.

But if the response this week is negative it will leave Sydney without a round next week -- unless, of course, Cochrane backs off on Eastern Creek.

Despite all the tough talk, there are precedents for Cochrane U-turns. Most vivid in our memory is his outburst early last year that the V8s would not be seen on Channel 10 if they went back to Australian Grand Prix this year.

What happened? The V8s were back at the GP this year, and they were screened on 10.

We believe it would be a blight on Australian motorsport if there were not a V8 Supercar round in Sydney next year -- but we are far from convinced that Homebush is the way forward, even if now there are few options.

In any case, V8SA is looking to confirm the 2009 calendar in early September -- although it will pretty much fall into place as soon as the Homebush decision is known.

A couple of things are already certain -- the calendar will be more condensed, and the new Townsville street race will be on July 10-12.

The spectre of night races has been raised again in recent days. We don't think they're a goer. They might be if Australia had NASCAR-style oval races, but no on road courses.

We well remember the hype about the Peter Brock Classic at Melbourne's Calder Park in the mid-1990s. A great night of racing it was, but our recollection is that the telecaster (Channel 9) got very cold feet ahead of it and that when it happened the sponsors were massively dissatisfied with how their liveries came up on TV.

Cochrane claims V8 Supercar night racing would rate its pants off on 7 now, but we can't see him getting the chance to put that to the test in a hurry.

Changes that are definitely on the way in V8 Supercars though are that lots of meetings will be cut to two days and there will be just two races per sprint round.

Testing, already very limited, will be curbed further, pitstop "windows" will be abolished in races, and refueling will be introduced.

The cars will run next year on ethanol -- E85, as IndyCars already do -- and that cleaner fuel is sure to be a card that Cochrane will be playing hard in his quest for the Homebush event.

V8SA is pegging race sanction fees at 2008 levels, saying it is "in the interest of the fans" -- that is, hoping that promoters keep ticket prices affordable.

This is a magnanimous gesture by V8SA, and we'll be interested, in time, in evidence that the cost of the V8 "show" to promoters is indeed frozen next year -- especially those promoters backed by taxpayer money, including the Australian GP (where the V8 Supercar races are non-championship).

While there is some gloom in the sport domestically at the minute, Cochrane claims to have raised $16 million in sponsorship in the past month. He has downplayed the role of manufacturers Holden and Ford in the sport, saying "the red versus blue thing is losing its importance", that the focus now is much more on teams, and that research is showing fans are more open to the entry of a new manufacturer.

Not entirely surprising, but is there a manufacturer out there interested in entering? Not that we can see.

Mark Winterbottom won the two Sunday races, after second in the Saturday race, and has the stamp of a champion. He and his Ford Performance Racing Falcon have the best speed and the most consistency at the minute.

The title is looking to us now like a two-man fight -- Winterbottom v. Holden's defending champion Garth Tander, who is 122 points behind the Ford leader.

Third-placed Jamie Whincup in his Triple 8/Team Vodafone Falcon is now 208 points behind Winterbottom, while Holden's 2006 champion Rick Kelly is 382 points off the lead after getting innocently tangled up in the Mark Skaife-Steven Richards incident in Race Two at Willowbank.

The endurance races at Phillip Island and Bathurst could shake up the points table, and -- much as we don't wish anyone any misfortune -- the championship looks as though it is going to need that.

Otherwise it is hard to see the title coming to the enthralling climax it has the past two years. Even then it hasn't been a TV audience bonanza for the series.

It will be a pity if the Oran Park finale at the start of December is a "dead rubber".

One of the highlights of the Queensland Raceway round was James Courtney finally winning a race with Stone Brothers Racing on Saturday -- an appropriate answer to his rivals who recently voted him the most over-rated driver in the category.

It was a pity not to see Courtney go on with the job on Sunday, a set-up problem restricting him to sixth in Race Two and then he was back up in second place in Race Three to ensure a podium for the weekend.

It's interesting, but may be just coincidence, that the only two teams Ford will give financial support to next year -- FPR and Stones -- were so clearly the pick of the Blue Oval bunch at Ipswich and that it was such a poor weekend for Triple 8/Team Vodafone at its home track.

Whincup was sixth overall for the round -- and fourth among the Ford drivers -- while Craig Lowndes was not among the top 10 pointscorers for the weekend.

Russell Ingall is very much back in town after his return to the Holden fold, with a second place and two thirds that made him the weekend's runner-up to Winterbottom.

The Paul Morris Motorsport/Supercheap Autos team has clearly made strides and Ingall is now saying a round win is not out of the question this year -- and that it could be looking at being a title contender next year.

We suspect that is all too optimistic, but it raises questions about the performance of Walkinshaw Performance -- which is responsible for the Commodores of Tander, Skaife, Rick Kelly and Paul Dumbrell.

The Holden Racing Team and HSV Dealer Team are meant to be the General's flag bearers, but they have not been bearing the flag very well of late. The ball has been dropped somewhere on the Holden side of the fence.

It's a pity to see Rick Kelly virtually out of title contention, as he is a young man who knows how to put a championship campaign together, but his misfortune at the weekend was not a matter of mechanical preparation.

Skaife continues to come under pressure; many would say puts himself under the pump.

FPR team chief Tim Edwards added plenty of spice after the Skaife-Richards incident with his comment that: "Someone of his (Skaife's) experience shouldn't be making a mistake like that. The sooner he retires the better for all of us."

As we have said before, we can't see any need for five-time champion Skaife to retire from the driver's seat when he's only 41 -- still comparatively young by many international touring car standards.

Steven Richards upheld the gentlemanly reputation established by his father Jim by writing off his tail tap from Skaife by saying: "It seems we are always fighting back from incidents like these."

His fans may have felt he could have invoked a word his dad used, most unusually, on the podium at Bathurst in the early 1990s after winning the Great Race in a Nissan.

Anyway, Richards Junior can console himself that, while he is not in serious title contention, a Bathurst victory may well be beckoning in October, provided he is paired with Winterbottom.

V8 Supercar teams championship standings -- Ford Performance Racing 2,993 points, Team Vodafone 2,661, Toll Holden Racing Team 2,510, Stone Brothers Racing 2,145, Jim Beam Racing 2,058, HSV Dealer Team 2,004, Garry Rogers Motorsport 1,684, Supercheap Auto Racing 1,640, Brad Jones Racing 1,577, Tasman Motorsport 1,546, Jack Daniels Racing 1,468, Britek Motorsport 1,022.

Lewis Hamilton was commanding in his McLaren-Mercedes, even if victory was made tougher for him than it needed to be.

Hamilton's dominance at the British GP two weeks ago, where his winning margin was the biggest in F1 in 13 years, and now at Germany's Hockenheim, reminds us of the style of the great Jim Clark, who coincidentally was killed 40 years ago in an innocuous Formula 2 race at Hockenheim -- a much different circuit to what it is now.

Ferrari has somehow suddenly lost its way. Felipe Massa qualified on the front row alongside Hamilton was never in the hunt, and reigning world champion Kimi Raikkonen was off the pace all weekend.

Hamilton is the first driver to win two GPs in a row this season. He now has four wins for the season, more than any of his rivals, and 8 in his career, giving him a strike rate of close to one-in-three -- again something in common with Clark.

After McLaren kept him out on the track for what seemed too long after German Timo Glock's crash in his Toyota, Hamilton dropped to fifth at Hockenheim but was quickly back up to third, then muscled his way past Massa and the Renault of Nelson Piquet Junior, who still notched an amazing second place -- largely courtesy of just one pitstop.

Piquet has had only four finishes from 10 F1 starts and only two them have been in the points.

The other was seventh in France and suddenly he bobs up on the podium in Germany.

Not only has the Brazilian, son of a triple world champion, saved his spot for the rest of the season, he has achieved something that his dual world champion teammate Fernando Alonso has not this year.

While Alonso has finished in the points eight times this season his best finish has been 4th in Melbourne at the start of the championship.

Australian Mark Webber's challenge petered out at Hockenheim after his Red Bull car began blowing ugly smoke soon after Glock's exit.

A pity for Webber as he had again qualified his Renault-powered Red Bull well, in eighth, directly ahead of the German youngster Sebastien Vettel in a similar Toro Rosso chassis with a Ferrari engine, and David Coulthard.

It has been confirmed that Vettel will become Webber's teammate next year in place of the retiring Coulthard. Ironically, it was Vettel who inadvertently robbed Webber of what might have been his best F1 finish -- second, and perhaps even victory -- in last year's Japanese GP at Fuji.

Clearly Red Bull is heading in the right direction, and '09 will be a great test of its driver line-up -- the now vastly experienced Webber and the still very young but massively talented Vettel.

The paddock was abuzz at the weekend with talk that McLaren will snare Nico Rosberg from Williams and replace Heikki Kovalainen.

The speculation was helped along by Willi Weber, who managed Michael Schumacher throughout his F1 career that included seven world titles and now handles the latest German rising star, Nico Hulkenberg -- best known as the 2006-07 A1 GP champion.

Weber is trying to steer Hulkenberg into a race drive at Williams -- and his chances would be greatly helped if Rosberg moved to McLaren.

It seems though that Rosberg has no performance get-out clause in his Williams-Toyota contract, so McLaren would have to pay Sir Frank Williams top dollar to unlock him.

Despite its denials, McLaren may do just that as Kovalainen has not cut the mustard as Hamilton's teammate and does not look worthy of a seat in such a great team.

He remains behind Robert Kubica and Nick Heidfeld in the championship, despite the BMW-Saubers not having been as competitive as might have been anticipated after Kubica's victory in Canada.

Hamilton's name was linked to Ferrari late last week, but he is on a long-term contract with McLaren, which groomed him for a decade for the success he is now enjoying.

It's far more likely that Alonso will end up with the red team, with Raikkonen seemingly set to retire at the end of next year.

But the question mark at Ferrari perhaps ought to be over Massa, who -- despite heading Raikkonen in the championship this year -- we must doubt, after seeing him outgunned at Hockenheim by Hamilton, has what it takes to become world champion.

One final thought on F1 today: perhaps it is time, with the field now back to 20 cars following the collapse of Super Aguri, it is time to revert to a points system that only rewards drivers down to sixth.

Doling out points to almost half the field no longer seems right to us in what is meant to be the world's premier motor racing championship.

All but two drivers -- Force India's Giancarlo Fisichella and Adrian Sutil -- have scored points this year, although Sutil deserved a bundle in Monaco but was taken out by Raikkonen.

Going back to a top-six system wouldn't do our Aussie driver Webber any favors, as he would have only seventh points for the season -- two from his fifth in Spain, four from his fourth in Monaco, and one for sixth in France.
  
Formula 1 drivers' world championship after 10 of 18 races -- Lewis Hamilton (McLaren-Mercedes) 58 points, Felipe Massa (Ferrari) 54, Kimi Raikkonen (Ferrari) 51, Robert Kubica (BMW-Sauber) 48, Nick Heidfeld (BMW-Sauber) 41, Heikki Kovalainen (McLaren-Mercedes) 28, Jarno Trulli (Toyota) 20, Mark Webber (Red Bull) 18, Fernando Alonso (Renault) 13, Rubens Barrichello (Honda) 11, Nelson Piquet (Renault) 10, Nico Rosberg (Williams-Toyota) 8, Kazuki Nakajima (Williams-Toyota) 8, David Coulthard (Red Bull) 6, Sebastian Vettel (Scuderia Toro Rosso) 6, Timo Glock (Toyota) 5, Jenson Button (Honda) 3, Sebastien Bourdais (Scuderia Toro Rosso) 2.

F1 constructors' world championship standings -- Ferrari 105 points, BMW-Sauber 89, McLaren-Mercedes 86, Toyota 25, Red Bull-Renault 24, Renault 23, Williams-Toyota 16, Honda 14, Toro Rosso-Ferrari 8.

A NASCAR race analyst with the ESPN television network, Daugherty -- a 42-year-old African American who played with the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA -- has become a partner in the JTG Racing outfit is associated.

Ambrose is hoping to make his first Sprint Cup start for JTG in next weekend's Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis. His Cup debut at Sonoma in California a few weeks back was with Wood Brothers.

Ambrose was 15th in last weekend's round of the second-tier Nationwide Series at Kentucky, Missouri, which lifted him 1 place in that championship to 12th.

Daugherty says that, apart from helping Tasmanian Ambrose realise his dream of a full-time Cup drive next year, he wants his part-ownership of JTG to "open some doors for more minorities to become involved in this great sport".

>> More on the Aussies in the US later in the week.

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