MOTORSPORT: Homebush plans heat up

Sydney street race moves up a gear
Darwin is hosting the sixth round of the V8 Supercar Championship this weekend - with Craig Lowndes trying to win for the third year in a row to stay in touch with Mark Winterbottom, Garth Tander, Jamie Whincup and Rick Kelly in the title chase - but most of the talk in Australian motorsport at the minute is about Sydney.

The prospect of a street race at the Homebush Olympic precinct in Sydney has seemingly taken a step forward.

A NSW government Cabinet sub-committee has given in-principle support to the proposal, but first there is to be a feasibility study - for which V8 Supercars Australia is footing the bill.

It has said that it will also underwrite the event each year, so that apart from initial start-up costs there will be no financial risk to the government. However, opponents are surfacing rapidly.

The board of the Sydney Olympic Park Authority is said to be unanimously against the idea, as are the green lobby and some major companies based at Homebush. And the Australian Racing Drivers Club, which operates the state-owned Eastern Creek circuit 20km further west in Sydney, has gone on the attack, saying its $350,000 feasability study from British company Apex on an upgrade there that could encompass three permanent circuits, including one meeting the highest international approval standards, is just weeks away.

ARDC president John Cotter said government investment in V8 Supercar racing, or motorsport generally, would be best directed to a permanent facility. We have often advocated the benefits of permanent tracks here over the exorbitant expense of temporary circuits, although unfortunately Eastern Creek's permanency has never translated into massive popularity with fans.

We note quite different approaches to the Homebush advance in Sydney's daily newspapers.

The upbeat report in the Daily Telegraph began: "Sydney is set to roar, with plans under way to hold a V8 Supercar championship race at Olympic Park from next year."

"While the government is yet to make a formal decision, the move is understood to have the backing of Premier Morris Iemma, who first mooted the idea two years ago only to backflip a month later," reporter Joe Hildebrand wrote.

"Senior ministers Ian Macdonald and Eric Roozendaal have been appointed to shepherd the project through and are also key backers.

"It is understood the proposal has been constantly stalled by bureaucrats, who have sought to choke it with red tape. Much of the resistance is believed to have come from the Sydney Olympic Park Authority, chaired by former Olympics minister Michael Knight.

"Government sources have said SOPA is concerned it would ruin the environmental ambience of Olympic Park, which has baffled those close to the negotiations. It's a sports and entertainment precinct for God's sake," one senior figure said. "It's not an art gallery."

The Sydney Morning Herald article, by Wendy Frew, was more negative, saying: "Sydney  Olympic Park, once lauded as the site of the 'Green Games', could be transformed into a giant racetrack by the end of the year after the state government gave in-principle support to a car race that could cost taxpayers $30 million and involve pulling up hundreds of trees and kilometres of tarmac.

"After years of rejecting similar events, the premier is supporting a proposal being pushed by the state development minister, Ian Macdonald, for a V8 Supercar race to be held at the park once a year for the next five years.

"The government is considering it seriously, despite unanimous opposition from the board of the Sydney Olympic Park Authority, chaired by the former Olympics minister Michael Knight.

"Three of the park's big commercial tenants - Commonwealth Bank, GPT Group and Babcock & Brown - also oppose it.

"The decision to consider it was made last month just after a report, commissioned by (premier) Morris Iemma, found the government's 'doesn't care' approach to tourism had cost the state $3.5 billion in potential revenue since the Olympics.

"Critics say V8 races in other cities have had mixed success. In May, the Western Australian government rejected a V8 race proposed for the centre of Perth; there are reports of a $3 million cost blow-out for next year's planned Townsville race; and a V8 race in Canberra in 1999 led to a net loss of more than $11 million over three years.

"A spokesman for Mr Iemma confirmed V8 Supercars Australia had applied to hold a street race at the park next year, but said the government was only conducting feasibility studies."

Greens MP Lee Rhiannon was quoted in the SMH article saying that economic and tourism benefits claimed to be associated with street races were illusory.

"The history of these events shows governments invest millions to end up with little more than a debt hangover," she said. "It is symbolic of this government's shabby environmental reputation that in an age of climate change and peak oil it should try to lure a motor car event to one of the few green icons in Sydney."

Frew wrote that the SOPA board was believed to be concerned about the lack of transparency in the process, lack of information about the true costs of holding an annual race, environmental damage and security and alcohol issues with car races.

An ABC report put a figure of $25 million on the state funding requirement to get the project up. It quoted minister Macdonald saying that V8SA had overcome problems with previous proposals for a Homebush street race and that the event was worthy of state support, would attract "hundreds of thousands of visitors" and be "highly profitable".

Eight years after the Sydney Olympics we can hear those immortal words, "Let the Games begin", loud and clear.

Champion headkicker Michael Knight versus V8SA honcho Tony Cochrane will be a bout not to be missed - and it's one that will probably need to be won by an early knockout.

Whether the event gets off the ground is an each-way bet. The forces gathering against it could prove formidable, but Cochrane is relentless in his quest. Next year just sounds a bit too soon to us if it is to happen.

Townsville a little further down road too
Townsville's street race is definitely on the go for the middle of next year, and Queensland Sport Minister Judy Spence this week unveiled the first map outlining the construction area for the Reid Park precinct.

But Ms Spence promptly had us wondering again just how much governments know about these things by calling it an "international event". We noted that she said: "Up to 70,000 people are expected to visit the city for the annual event, showcasing North Queensland to a massive audience."

And: "The (V8 Supercar) series attracts a potential international audience of up to 850 million viewers across 130 countries. This kind of coverage presents us with a great opportunity to promote Townsville as a tourism destination around the world."

Now while we are delighted to see a regional centre like Townsville get a round of the major national racing series, we reckon those 70,000 visitors are going to include lots of people counted three times, on each of the three days of the event.

What was this mention of massive audience? The audience will be, apart from those in the track at Reid Park, primarily Australian TV viewers - a few hundred thousand, perhaps around the average for a round of the series, maybe a little better if there is a decent build-up to the event.

We are pleased to note that Ms Spence included the word potential ahead of the international audience of 850 million, because as we have consistently pointed out here there is a very big disparity between the potential reach in overseas markets and the actual reach.

Actually, anyone would have great difficulty producing any evidence that the actual international audience for a V8 Supercar race is any more than one or two million viewers (when the British audience for one round this year was 5000 and for another 8000), but we fear that Ms Spence is deluding herself that the potential is the actual.

And, as pointed out here nine months ago, we have found the Queensland government before to be blind or deaf, perhaps both, to the realities of the comparatively miniscule audience of another of the state's government-backed motor sport events, this one genuinely international - the Gold Coast Indy (open-wheeler race).

Ms Spence reaffirmed the Queensland government was providing $14.61 million towards the total Townsville venue construction cost of $29.58 million. (The federal government is contributing $10 million and the Townsville council the rest).

"In addition, we (Queensland government) will contribute $2.5 million annually for the first five years of the event to ensure it is a success," Ms Spence said. "It is estimated that the event will generate $10 million a year in economic benefits for the Townsville region, with 130 full-time equivalent jobs created during construction.

"A further 180 full-time equivalent jobs will be created as a result of staging the three-day event each year."

Now, considering the outlay, is $10 million a year in economic benefits worth it? Of all the (inflated) figures we see and hear about economic benefits of street races, that sounds very low. And they're talking only $20 million benefit a year at Sydney's Homebush - again not a lot compared with the outlays.

Just why are these numbers so low when the last claimed yearly economic benefit for Melbourne's Formula 1 grand prix was about $175 million, and the Gold Coast Indy has consistently been quoted at around one-third of the F1 event, despite similarly claimed crowd numbers.

Perhaps those economic benefit reports, particularly for the GP, are not appropriate benchmarks. And maybe, just maybe, the numbers being trotted out for Townsville and Sydney are on the money, so to speak.

But, again, are those very modest numbers worth the hassles?

Making sense of some F1 numbers
Regular readers here might know that we've got a bit of a thing about numbers. TV numbers, crowd numbers, economic benefit numbers.

So it was with particular interest that we stumbled this week on an article about the audiences in Britain, often touted as the home of motorsport, for various Formula 1 races around the world.

What it tells us is that the 2007 Australian Grand Prix had something less than 3.43 million viewers in Britain, while this year's Oz GP got 3.9 million viewers.

Those 3.9 million viewers were for a mid-afternoon telecast of the race that ran in Melbourne in the early hours of the British morning.

From our reading of the tables in this article (more here), based on data from the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board, the audience for the Australian race compares surprisingly well with others that are held at more time-friendly hours for British viewers.

This year's British audience for the mid-afternoon telecast of the Melbourne race may have been helped by potential viewers knowing that "their" Lewis Hamilton was going to win the season-opener.

In light of how well Australia stacks up against other GPs in these tables, just how much bigger an audience would be gained by staging the Melbourne race at night - as F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone wants, and the Victorian government refuses to do - is questionable.

Not too much, we suspect. So twilight is all right.

The other thing these tables give us another clue to is that the average global audience for an F1 race is somewhere between 50 million and 100 million viewers, as we have stated for quite some time now - based on the research by Initiative Sports Futures, on which we have occasionally reported. And, again, those numbers are a long way short of Australian GP Corporation chairman Ron Walker's claims of 350 million viewers in 132 countries for the Melbourne race.

If the audience in Britain, the "home" of motorsport, is a bit less than 4 million viewers, on Walker's numbers there would need to be an average of 2.64 million in another 131 countries. Yet many of those countries would have much smaller populations than Britain and nowhere near as much interest in F1.

The realities are dawning.

Some big goading on GP losses
We have traditionally been skeptical of mathematics from the Save Albert Park group that has opposed Melbourne's GP from the outset, but we note with interest a claim in this week's Port Phillip Leader newspaper by SAP spokesman Peter Goad that the losses on the event will be up to $70 million a year by 2015 if the contract is extended beyond 2010 - and that the total bill at the end of such an extended contract would total more than $600 million.

In the language of stock market analysts, those numbers sound as though they are at the top end of expectations. We reckon they are probably a bit too high, but the financial picture is not good, especially for something that wasn't meant to cost Victorian taxpayers much, if anything.

Reebok cannot use any image of Hamilton in his racing gear, but a company spokesman said the 23-year-old McLaren driver's "personality and 'individualism" were enough. Meanwhile, a poll by Nuts TV Sports News ranked Hamilton the top F1 playboy of all time, but third in driving ability.

The playboy image has been helped by dating Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger and Miss World runner-up Vivian Burkhardt - as well as a couple of others who have done a few more laps, Naomi Campbell and Dannii Minogue.

But we are starting to wonder whether, after seeing the world title slip away from him in his fantastic debut season and now facing an uphill battle against Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa in year two, Hamilton is going to become another of those British "bridesmaid" sportspeople.

Anyway, here are the (very British-leaning) top five in the various categories of the Nuts poll:

(Our comment: Jackie Stewart would put himself behind Jim Clark, and where are Gilles Villeneuve and Jochen Rindt? Perhaps Mario Andretti? It's still too soon to consider Hamilton in this league.)

Sense of style

Webber says he can win, but not this Sunday
Mark Webber considers this weekend's British GP his second home race. He loves the Silverstone circuit and has gone in to bat for it in the face of Bernie Ecclestone's continual pressure for the venue to be upgraded.

Webber reckons Ferrari and McLaren are going to "absolutely walk" Sunday's race.

Those two teams have won nine of the past 10 British GPs, with Fernando Alonso winning in a Renault in 2006. Ferrari has won five of the eight races so far this season.

Webber, who leads his Red Bull teammate David Coulthard in the championship and has outqualified him at the last seven GPs, is pleased with how his season has gone since the unfortunate start in Melbourne.

"I know I have the talent to win a GP," Webber told Dutch sports daily AD Sportwereld Pro, saying he was about a month away from finalising a renewal of his Red Bull contract - although he was open to better offers.

The reality is he will stay put - and Red Bull is as good as he can expect to get - while Coulthard has announced that he will retire at the end of the season and take up a commentary role with the BBC when it takes back the British F1 rights next year.

"Not many teams have managed to get seven consecutive points-scoring finishes," said Webber, who notched points in six races straight. "Okay, maybe we're not banging out podiums and race wins but we are doing everything that can be asked of us at the moment.

"I'm pretty happy with the way I've been driving. Having a reliable car has helped and it will be asking a lot to maintain 100 per cent reliability through to the end of the year, but I hope the bad race weekend stays away for as long as possible.

"I'm comfortable with RB4 and I feel I can put it on the limit at most venues, which is encouraging. I am trying to keep the errors to a minimum and that's been reflected in our points tally.

"Qualifying is more than ever this year proving crucial in setting yourself up for a good race as you really need to be in a strong position at the end of your first race stint. Therefore grid position is important and this year, the qualifying procedure is a lot easier as you get a few chances to nail that lap, so there are no excuses for not doing the job in qualifying.

"Apart from Melbourne, where I had a brake problem, and Bahrain where I qualified 11th, I've made it through to Q3 in every race. As for the rest of the season, it's not going to get any easier for us and we still have to deliver week in and week out.

"It's a cliche but I'll be taking every race as it comes.

"In terms of the opposition, Renault have definitely not performed to their maximum yet and we can expect strong opposition from them and from a few other drivers and teams that have maybe underperformed so far."

For Webber fans hungry for more, here's a link to his column for BBC Sport.

And he gets a big wrap too from Red Bull team chief Christian Horner in his mid-year report here.

Now an Indian Premier League of racing?
India's Premier League cricket has been a huge success, and now that country may get a Racing Premier League.

Team India Motor Racing (TIM) is planning the racing league along the lines of the cricket series. TIM, part of the Spice Group of companies and which owns Team India in the global A1 Grand Prix series, is reportedly working closely with A1GP to start the new Indian series by 2009-10.

"We're looking to buy out an existing format which has not done well in countries such as the United States and Europe," said A1 Team India CEO Andaleeb Sehgal. "We can buy out their set of cars and supporting deals such as with engine manufactures and place it in India.

"We have already identified four cities (Chennai, Delhi, Jaipur and Goa) where we can start this league."

The GP Master Series in Britain and the Atlantic Championship in the US are said to be in the sights of the Indians.

It's an unusual approach, but based on the cricket experience it might just be a winner.

Franchitti's NASCAR career in tatters
It was only a little more than 13 months ago that Dario Franchitti won the Indianapolis 500. Even more recently he became the champion in the final season of the former Indy Racing League.

This week he lost his drive in NASCAR's Sprint Cup when team owners Chip Ganassi and Felix Sabates shut the team that fielded his Dodge Avenger, putting 71 people out of work.

Ganassi blamed a lack of sponsorship - a problem that Franchitti's open-wheeler success and having Ashley Judd as his wife could not overcome.

Ganassi wants Franchitti to continue to drive a stock car for him in the second tier Nationwide Series in which Australia's Marcos Ambrose is competing full-time (as well as trying to get his Sprint Cup career off the ground).

Ganassi and Sabates will continue to field Juan Pablo Montoya, who is 20th in the Sprint Cup, and Reed Sorensen, who is 32nd in the series.

Franchitti's switch to NASCAR was not helped by a broken ankle that kept him out of 5 races and failing to qualify at the Sonoma road course in California, where Ambrose made his premier series debut - qualifying seventh in a Ford Fusion and running as high as second until a gearbox failure.

The first European (he's a Scotsman of Italian heritage) to try NASCAR full-time, Franchitti's best Sprint Cup finish was 22nd.

Ganassi and Sabates have had only won Sprint Cup win in the past six years, so it seems the poor results are not all Franchitti's fault.

Here are some links for Franchitti fans wanting more: blogs.orlandosentinel.com, sports.espn.go.com, and www2.journalnow.com.

ARC loses a round, tarmac event in the offing
What a sorry mess Australian rallying is these days.

Apart from our doubts about whether Rally Australia will be revived next year (despite already having a sponsor) and CAMS going after the "rebel" AASE series claiming it has no right to call itself any kind of Australian rally championship, this week the plug was pulled on the Rally of Melbourne - the scheduled ARC fifth round on October 18-20.

"Fallout from difficulties in the global economic credit market" were blamed for the cancellation in the official announcement.

Event director Neil Cuthbert said "the effects of a sponsorship shortfall and the loss of traditional lines of funding from the ARC left a significant funding gap which made the event in 2008 unviable".

"We are starting work on something special for 2009," Cuthbert said.

ARCom Chairman Colin Trinder said talks about a replacement event were already advanced.

"We have had talks with a couple of event organisers who are in a position to promote a round of the ARC in 2008 and we will be in a position to make an announcement about those plans in the very near future," Trinder said.

Organisers of the Tasmanian Tarmac Challenge at Burnie on October 4-5 want that event to be the replacement round.

"This would be a great opportunity to add a tarmac event to the national series," said TTC organiser Scott Spedding.

Meanwhile, Subaru world rally team test driver Markko Martin has said the new Impreza WRC2008 should be very competitive for Australia's Chris Atkinson and teammate Petter Solberg to drive on the asphalt events in Germany, Spain and France in the second half of the season.

Martin did the first tarmac test with new Impreza in the hills of Italy recently.

Young Rahal in Penske's sights
Roger Penske, now in his 70s and who has missed a couple of races recently through illness, is reportedly "going hard" after young Graham Rahal for his IndyCar team next year.

Veteran American open-wheeler correspondent Robin Miller mentioned it on US Speed Channel program Wind Tunnel this week, raising questions about whether Rahal would replace Australian Ryan Briscoe or Brazilian Helio Castroneves.

Although Castroneves is higher in the championship and has consistently finished races in the top five, the two-time Indianapolis 500 winner is apparently out of contract at the end of the season.

Briscoe won the Milwaukee race a week after the Indy 500 and appears to have Penske's support.

Rahal, son of Bobby, is the youngest driver in the series and won the opening race of the season in Florida. He is driving for Newman/Haas/Lanigan IndyCar, one of the former Champ Car outfits that are struggling against the IndyCar powerhouses (Ganassi, Andretti Green and Penske).

This weekend the IndyCar Series is at Watkins Glen, the famous road course in New York State where Briscoe finished third in a one-off drive for Dreyer & Reinbold Racing in 2006.

The road course should also suit Australia's other representative in the series, Will Power, who has had some difficulty adapting to the American oval tracks.

At the halfway mark of the IndyCar season 15 drivers have had top five finishes, but the odds-on favorite this weekend is New Zealander Scott Dixon, the Indy 500 winner and series leader, who has won at Watkins Glen the past three years.

Force India has half a win
German magazine Auto Motor und Sport has reported that F1 team Force India has won a payment of 4.5 million euros from Red Bull's secondary team Toro Rosso in a long-running dispute over the eligibility of "customer cars".

Force India principal Colin Kolles wanted 9 million euros, but Bernie Ecclestone apparently brokered a settlement at half that amount.

Mosley case set for court
Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) president Max Mosley's case against the News of the World newspaper, which revealed his orgy with five prostitutes, will go to court in London next Monday (July 7).

The Times newspaper has reported that Mosley will seek exemplary damages - that is, damages to punish or make an example of a party found to have done a deliberate wrong or been grossly negligent and where compensatory damages do not seem to be enough.

Even if Mosley wins, will we ever hear the end of this matter?

Hope not.

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