MOTORSPORT: Horror TV numbers on Bahrain

It was to the effect that, if V8 Supercars Australia was handsomely paid for taking its show to the Middle East kingdom and the teams presumably got some of the spoils, and the vision in the telecast was excellent, what did it matter that there was next to nobody at the event.

Well it turns out it may matter.

It may matter very much indeed.

Particularly in the context of there being talk of another Middle East round in the V8 Supercar Championship from 2010, supposedly in Abu Dhabi.

And also in the context that information has come to us that the TV audience in Australia for last weekend's Bahrain round was, in a nutshell, dreadful.

TV sources tell us that the number of viewers of the Bahrain racing last weekend -- on Friday night, Saturday night, and the Sunday replay -- were perhaps about, or little more than, half the number of TV viewers that watched the round at Sydney's Eastern Creek earlier this year.

Now we haven't seen the raw numbers, but our sources tell us that Friday night's telecast of the first race in Bahrain was down 25 per cent on the corresponding race from Bahrain last year.

The Saturday night telecast of races two and three was down 15 per cent.

And the Sunday replay was apparently down 40 per cent!

Despite being in a time-friendlier slot, that Sunday afternoon replay may have had less than a quarter of a million viewers.

We are hearing numbers of about 175,000 for Friday night, about 215,000 on Saturday night, and about 240,000 on Sunday afternoon -- for a total, perhaps sub-total, of about 630,000.

Now if that was the audience in Oz, it totals less than half the telecast audience of this year's Eastern Creek round.

To be fair, and without having seen the raw data for ourselves, it may be only the total for the five mainland capital cities, in which case the total could be about 30 per cent higher - if the regional audience(s) still need to be added.

But even boosting the total by 30 per cent to 820,000 leaves it way short of Eastern Creek's 1.36 million viewers for a two-day telecast.

Indeed, on these numbers Eastern Creek is still more than 50 per cent ahead.

Yet where is Eastern Creek on next year's V8 Supercar calendar?

It's not there. It's been shafted; told it's not up to the mark; that next year's sole Sydney round, after the Oran Park finale in three weeks, will be the new Homebush 400 on a temporary street race at Sydney Olympic Park.

And while Eastern Creek is being sold down the drain, left in mid-air on its major redevelopment plans by a NSW government that is on the nose but seduced by the idea of the Homebush street race, there is talk of another round in the Middle East that, presumably, will produce similar TV numbers to Bahrain.

TV numbers that are perhaps around half those of a round at a permanent Sydney track.

V8 Supercar telecaster the Seven Network hasn't been crowing about its Bahrain telecast after the event, perhaps because it now appears there's nothing to crow about.

But before the event it boasted that the Desert 400 in Bahrain was "the single biggest international sports broadcast undertaken by an Australian network this year -- outside of Seven's coverage of the Olympic Games".

Seven sent 18 tonnes of broadcast equipment to Bahrain and an Australian crew of 75 produced the coverage.

A lot of effort that for what now seems to be a very ordinary result.

And we gather the claimed three-day attendance at the circuit in Bahrain was 35,000.

That compares with an announced crowd of 28,511 at the Eastern Creek round this year.

Now we reckon one of those numbers is probably pretty close to the mark and the other very wide of the mark.

Guess which is which?

At one of the tracks the spectators must have had 10 heads each to produce the headcount that was announced.

Thankfully the racing in Bahrain was good - and there is the prospect of two good rounds to go this season, at Symmons Plains in Tasmania and Oran Park in Sydney -- because some of these numbers relating to V8 Supercar racing in the Middle East are an ugly picture.

We wonder, and in time may inquire, what the participating manufacturers reckon about it all.

But for now they've probably got enough on their minds, what with the problems of their parent companies in the US.

Perhaps a matter for quiet contemplation over the summer.

<<< First of these was Prodrive/Ford Performance Racing supremo David Richards' comments on the future of V8 Supercar racing.

"The real fundamental thing about what we're in now is what will V8s be in five years' time," Richards said.

"What will the Australian top-end race series look like five years from now?

"I suppose it does have to think about being more relevant to the customer base and start to listen to what Ford and GM and perhaps new manufacturers want from race series.

"But, at the same time, it's been so successful and it's so iconic we've got to very careful not to suddenly disrupt it because it's still got a place in the hearts of all Australians as we can see from the following it gets."

Food for thought there from D.R. As much as we bemoan here that the V8 Supercar Championship has become the domain of foreign entities -- Triple 8, Prodrive and Walkinshaw Performance -- the international perspectives of the likes of Richards are pertinent.

As much as we note his admission of the following that V8s have in Oz, increasingly important will be the need for racing to be in tune -- i.e. relevant -- to the changing car market.

That's why we so much liked the sound of an SUV series mooted a couple of months ago.

Haven't heard anymore about that since, and -- as good as the idea was -- we doubted from the outset the ability of those involved to make much of it.

<<< Second among this week's Auto Action reports to catch our eye was the aftermath of Larry Perkins' attack on Confederation of Australian Motorsport (CAMS) officials in Bahrain over Todd Kelly's drive-through penalty for passing the safety car in the first race, costing Perkins' Jack Daniels Racing its first podium of the year.

Not only is V8 Supercar's top "cop" Peter Wollerman investigating Perkins' outburst -- that race officials were "incompetent" and "morons" -- but chief steward Steve Chopping has retorted that Perkins has been "gutless" and that he is considering legal action over the comments.

The AA report by editor-at-large Mark Fogarty says that, apart from his remarks on television, Perkins "railed against Wollerman and the stewards in their trackside offices".

And Fogarty reports that V8SA chief Tony Cochrane rejected any suggestion of that organisation punishing Perkins, and denying that "L.P." had been "sent home" from Bahrain for his "sins".

<<< Thirdly, a bigger issue raised in AA -- and one that has interested us for years -- is the relationship between CAMS and circuit owners and race promoters.

Fogarty reports that "V8 Supercars is leading a revolt against CAMS by circuit owners and race promoters, who are up in arms over sharp increases in the cost of fees and services".

"V8SA is particularly unhappy with CAMS' regulatory system and has threatened to set up its own national sporting authority to administer the FIA (Federation Internationale de l'Automobile) rules," Fogarty writes.

"Backed by most of the country's circuits and promoters, V8 tsar Tony Cochrane has called a summit meeting with Australia's FIA representative and World Motor Sport Council member, Garry Connelly."

Now we found this story very interesting but our alarm went off, indeed screeched, when we got to the end of the eighth paragraph to discover that the proposed new national sporting authority would be "run by V8SA and funded with the circuits and promoters".

No, no, no, no, no.

That is not what Australian motorsport needs.

Indeed it is the exact opposite of what Australian motorsport needs.

V8SA's sole priority, focus, business is V8 Supercar racing, and it has not been backward in making that known.

There are other categories of motor racing, and perhaps new ones in the future, and there are the circuit owners and operators and race promoters who don't necessarily have tracks of their own, and they need not -- and indeed ought not -- delegate their negotiating to V8SA, which will always think of itself first and foremost.

It's all very well for Tony Cochrane to go talking to Garry Connelly, but -- even if disgraced in the eyes of so many -- we can be sure that FIA president Max Mosley will get a message to Cochrane that the FIA won't be copping this idea.

CAMS has been far from perfect for as long as we've been observing it, but the reality is that the only prospect is that things be improved in and around it rather than it be replaced.

Reed was already booked to race one of the new Toyotas in the Aussie Racing Cars series final round at Oran Park on the first weekend of December.

Now comes word that he is to drive one of Neal Bates Super 2000 Corolla rally cars in a couple of rounds of next year's Australian Rally Championship.

And he'll drive a Toyota Trophy Truck in next year's Finke Desert Race in the Northern Territory.

It will be great to see one of our international motor racing stars doing so much more on home soil.

But it makes us wonder where that leaves Reed's V8 Supercar ambitions.

Of course, there have been people keen to see Toyota get involved in V8 Supercar racing, but even in the unlikely event it did it's hardly likely to have a touring car rookie, no matter how famous, as its main man.

Incidentally, it's the final round of this year's Australian Rally Championship at Coffs Harbour in NSW this weekend.

Neal Bates is virtually assured of his fourth national title there -- a long time after his three in the '90s.

It will be the first ARC round at Coffs Harbour for eight years.

We always applaud major motorsport events being held in regional areas, but staging the championship finale so far from a capital city seems like madness to us.

Not only that, it probably takes rallying back further than where it was eight or 10 years ago.

Unfortunately, rallying in this country these days is not only largely out of sight but even more so out of the minds of the Australian motorsport public.

And that's something that it's going to take a lot more than a couple of Chad Reed appearances to change.

Incidentally, Cody Crocker completed his Asia-Pacific Rally Championship campaign with a victory in China last week in his 2007 Subaru entered by Singapore's Motor Image team.

He'd already won the championship -- his third in Asia, after a hat-trick in Australia.

Dean Herridge was third in China last weekend in a 2008 Subaru Impreza.

The final round of the World Rally Championship is in Britain on the first weekend of December.

French icon Sebastien Loeb has already won the drivers' title, while his manufacturer Citroen leads Ford -- the champion car maker of the past two years -- by 11 points, so our money's on Citroen.

Even many in Queensland were slow to pick up on what was happening.

The analysis of the changeover has been superficial.

We did our bit on Tuesday and will keep an eye on developments, including the likely formal signing of a contract between the Gold Coast organisers and A1 GP in the near future.

In the meantime we must mention, in light of our comment on Tuesday that the event now faces a serious identity crisis in shaking the "Indy" tag, that there is a competition to find a new name for it.

The competition was announced in the state's parliament by Queensland sports minister Judy Spence -- she who wrongly claimed months ago the Indy deal had been renewed for six years, who hasn't got a clue about the size of the A1 GP television audience, and wouldn't face up to how miniscule the Indy audience was in the US (if she even knew).

Now she needs a hand to find a new name for what is her state's biggest annual event.

Someone please give Judy a big hand.

While it seems there is agreement on the need to reduce engine costs for smaller teams, and indeed that is pretty much in train, we glean that there is a lot of cynicism among the teams about the public statements of FIA president Max Mosley and F1 commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone about widespread cost-cutting.

Many within the teams seem to think that, while these initiatives may sound wonderful for public consumption, the agenda for them is not as simple as it appears; that the real agenda is about preserving money within the F1 "cake" -- essentially the Ecclestone-controlled empire -- for private equity investment group CVC to meet its huge repayments on the loans it has on its 75 per cent stake in the key Ecclestone company.

The contrary view is that the teams have worked hard to entice manufacturers and sponsors into the sport and that, while ever those companies are prepared to spend as they have on F1, there is little need -- or should that be little scope -- to prescribe cost-cutting.

As so often, the reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

Meanwhile, Honda -- having missed out on getting Fernando Alonso from Renault -- and Scuderia Toro Rosso will be trialling several drivers each in coming days.

We'd be surprised if, one way or another way or another, 25-year-old Brazilian Bruno Senna doesn't land a seat for 2009.

If it's at Honda it will squeeze out his countryman Rubens Barrichello, veteran of a record 270 GPs.

Four-time Champ Car champion Sebastien Bourdais has been under pressure at Toro Rosso but we suspect the Frenchman will get a second season.

Wouldn't be surprised if Japan's Takuma Sato gets the other Toro Rosso seat, vacated by German wonderboy Sebastien Vettel, who is going to be Aussie Mark Webber's teammate at Red Bull Racing.

Sato has experience, some form and would be a good ambassador in Japan for Red Bull (half-owner of Toro Rosso, which means Red Bull in Italian) but it has always been felt that Gerhard Berger, the other half-owner of Toro Rosso, has a soft spot for young Senna because of his close friendship with the Brazilian's uncle, the incomparable Ayrton Senna.

The boy has a magic name, but if he gets into that elite F1 club he'd better be damn good, because the sport is full of talent right now.

Lewis Hamilton, Vettel, Robert Kubica, Nico Rosberg, perhaps Adrian Sutil if he had better machinery -- as he may now that Force India has hitched its wagon to McLaren Mercedes and dropped its Ferrari engines.

To comment on this article click here