MOTORSPORT: Hotseats on and off track

The scene is even more exciting in America's NASCAR series, where Jimmie Johnson's quest for a record fourth straight crown has been made harder after a crash in Texas -- and where Australia's Marcos Ambrose almost jagged second place in the weekend's 500-mile (800km) race, but ran out of fuel on the second last lap.

Johnson's lead over veteran Mark Martin was cut from 184 points to 73, with two rounds to go in that series too - at Phoenix, Arizona, and Homestead, Florida.

There's excitement in other ways too. What will be the upshot of the safety car incident at Phillip Island on Sunday?

Whincup called it -- having to stop behind the safety car, driven by Amber Anderson as he re-entered the circuit after a pitstop as other cars raced down the straight at about 250kmh -- as "massively dangerous".

Rick Kelly, third behind Whincup and Davison on Saturday and second to Whincup on Sunday, said it was "absolutely dangerous". Garth Tander did not want head-hunting or lynching over the incident, but said "the race director (Tim Schenken) was standing right on top of that".

Chief steward Steve Chopping denied there was any communication breakdown.

"The position we put the safety car is to give maximum visibility to the cars that are on the circuit," Chopping said. "Once it was established that Whincup was still the leader the field had backed up. There was no miscommunication, or communication breakdowns."

It was something of a miracle that there wasn't a major crash, yet -- in the finest traditions of Australian motorsport -- will it all now be swept under the carpet?

And there's excitement building in what might be called the political scene of national motorsport. V8 Supercars Australia is ramping up its play to take over the staging of the Gold Coast carnival -- this year called SuperGP, previously Indy (when American open-wheeler cars raced at it).

V8SA executive director Tony Cochrane is kicking his former employer IMG (International Management Group), the partner in running the event with the Queensland government, over the A1 GP bungle this year.

Indeed, it is more than a year since Cochrane told BigPond Sport: "The A1 GP is $320 million in the red and my personal thought is that the (Queensland) government wouldn't look at that championship. Everyone has seen the figures from the Eastern Creek A1 GP round (in Sydney) and they were terrible. I doubt the government would jump out of the fat (after the loss of IndyCar) and into the fire."

Now that was 14 months ago. Just weeks after that Queensland premier Anna Bligh said: "The A1 GP is a world-class racing series with an action-packed race calendar that includes Great Britain, China, Mexico, Portugal, Malaysia, New Zealand, Indonesia, South Africa and the Netherlands. As a result of this deal (for A1 GP to come to the Gold Coast) Queensland will now be a permanent fixture on the calendar as well."

Well A1 GP is now as good as dead, although not finally and formally certified dead. Cochrane turned out to be absolutely right. Not everyone had seen the figures from Eastern Creek as he said, although anyone who really needed to know them -- like Gold Coast Motor Events Company (GCMEC), the partnership between IMG and the Queensland government -- could have got them without much trouble, and probably had them.

An irony is that, we believe, Eastern Creek has recovered all monies owed to it by A1 GP while GCMEC has lawyers trying to recoup its $1.8 million deposit -- and next to no hope of getting it. Against this background, V8SA this week will lodge its submission on the future of the Gold Coast event.

While its preference would be for it to be pretty much a pure V8 Supercar show, it will accede to Queensland government wishes to incorporate an international component, and Cochrane has also publicly welcomed the idea of historics playing a big part -- an extension of this year's last-minute Legends activity.

Cochrane has told BigPond Sport this week: "We are not necessarily saying that we have to run the event; we certainly have our hand up saying that we would like to run the event, because we would like to improve it enormously, (and) we certainly don't want to be caught out again by being dragged through all of the embarrassing issues that they had at this year's event where we had to become the saviour at the end of the day."

On an international category, Cochrane said: "We have certainly made it very clear that we want clarity going forward before Christmas. If you are going to have an international component then clearly the more time that you have to find that then the better off that you are. Any decent category in the world has already released its 2010 calendar, so you are already playing behind the eight ball; any decent category, you are asking them to change their calendar for 2010."

Cochrane claimed -- again -- that the Gold Coast carnival can survive without an international component, but that it could not exist without V8 Supercars.

"We are the single biggest chunk of that event," he said. "As bad as the crowd dropped (last month) there were still 205,000 people there. We bring some very vital elements to that event. We are responsible for the largest chunk of ticket sales; we are certainly responsible for the largest chunk of corporate sales and we bring the TV component.

"Even when it was IRL (Indy Racing League) or CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams, later Champ Car) we were filming it for them and giving them our pictures."

Now this is where it gets interesting. Allan Edwards, the author of the

"The main purpose of that event on the Gold Coast is to drive tourism -- and the number one tourism market for the Gold Coast is other states of Australia and their second biggest tourism market is New Zealand," Cochrane said. "We still delivered 10 hours of live TV in Australia and NZ and 130 countries around the world who take it around the world in part or full."

Now we -- and we suspect everyone else -- is yet to see what those 130 countries were, how much of the SuperGP they screened, either live or delayed, when, and any -- let alone credible -- reporting or evidence of what audience numbers any screenings drew in those countries.

Apart from this TV point, Cochrane is politicking quite brilliantly on this issue -- and he may well hold great sway at the Queensland government investigation into -- and particularly the future of - the Gold Coast event, simply because nobody else will do that part as well.

But in amongst all of this we are starting to get towards the truth of matters on the TV front, especially in the context of events on which governments spend millions of dollars of taxpayers' money.

What is abundantly clear is that the overwhelming bulk of the audience for the Gold Coast event, and indeed V8 Supercar racing generally, is in Australia and NZ. The argument is now being tweaked, even twisted, to project the value of government spending on street races being an enticement for tourists from other states and NZ. This is a massive climbdown from the pretence for so long that such events had enormous, or even potentially enormous, international TV exposure -- and the notion that would translate into hordes of international tourists to the host venues.

In reality, these street races are very little, if any, more than an Australasian affair. David Williams, the man commissioned with reporting to the Queensland government by the end of this month on the future of the Gold Coast event, might wonder whether tourism authorities or experts could run better tourism campaigns with the $11.6 million that state government has been spending each year on the Indy/SuperGP -- or even half that amount, which Cochrane has said V8SA would do the job for.

The same kind of consideration will be equally applicable in Sydney, where the New South Wales government is up for many millions on the new Homebush race on the first weekend of December. The hype is stepping up on Homebush, mainly about the non-racing entertainment until the Perth round is run on November 21-22.

The ABC's Stateline TV program in NSW ran an eight-minute story last Friday that presented some of the contrary arguments.

Some other fodder for consideration in the bigger picture of V8 Supercar racing ought to be the worrying signs from Phillip Island last weekend. The two-day crowd there was announced as being 15,345. This was a round, remember, that replaced one in Bahrain -- as there will be two Middle East rounds at the start of next season, and V8SA apparently was paid for the Bahrain round this year despite the kingdom "forfeiting" it.

That 15,345 is a very poor attendance, and 20,000 less than the attendance claimed for last year's Bahrain round (not that anyone believed it). Of perhaps even greater concern were the OzTAM audience numbers for last Sunday's telecast on the Seven Network -- an average 354,000 in the five major capital cities, with more viewers in Brisbane (108,000) than either Sydney (90,000) or Melbourne (75,000).

In particular, that Sydney number -- if it is a true indicator of the interest in V8 Supercar racing in the country's biggest city -- is a loud alarm less than four weeks out from the Homebush event. And these numbers do nothing to substantiate the oft-made claim that V8 Supercars is the country's fastest-growing sport.

V8 Supercar Championship top 10 after 22 of 26 races -- Jamie Whincup (Ford) 2905 points, Will Davison (Holden) 2783, Garth Tander (H) 2565, Craig Lowndes (F) 2292, Mark Winterbottom (F) 1964, Steven Johnson (F) 1961, Rick Kelly (H) 1925, Lee Holdsworth (H) 1817, James Courtney (F) 1790, Russell Ingall (H) 1676.

NASCAR Sprint Cup standings after 34 of 36 races -- Jimmie Johnson (Chevrolet) 6297 points, Mark Martin (Chevrolet) 6224, Jeff Gordon (Chevrolet) 6185, Kurt Busch (Dodge) 6126, Tony Stewart (Chevrolet) 6119, Juan Pablo Montoya (Chevrolet) 6061, Greg Biffle (Ford) 6050, Denny Hamlin (Toyota) 5975, Ryan Newman (Chevrolet) 5973, Kasey Kahne (Dodge) 5898, Carl Edwards (Ford) 5857, Brian Vickers (Toyota) 5777. (Marcos Ambrose is 18th in a Toyota on 3637 points).

Carolyn Schonafinger has reported for

"The future of Rally Australia now once again looks in doubt," Schonafinger wrote. "With three of the event's main organising team now out of the picture, a new general manager will have his/her work cut out starting from scratch.

"Upson, Newman and Pearce will take a huge amount of knowledge with them, and a new team will have to rebuild relationships with governments, local councils, sponsors and the like. "It is also understood the event has a number of other hurdles to overcome in order for it to run in the future. RallySport Magazine believes that no sponsor is tied in for future events, that funding from the NSW government has not been guaranteed, nor has a guarantee been given that future WRC events will be held in Australia."

Garland eyes Dakar top 10 with new ute
The Australian hero of this year's Dakar Rally, Bruce Garland, is buttering up for another crack at the world's toughest motorsport event -- and aiming for a top 10 finish. In a "home-made" Isuzu D-Max diesel ute, Garland and co-driver Harry Suzuki were 11th -- and first diesel ute and first production-chassis car -- in the first "Dakar" held in South America, after terrorism fears drove the event out of Europe and Africa.

For the 9000km rally raid in Argentina and Chile from next January 2 to 17 they have a new D-Max ute. The 3.0-litre turbocharged engine's maximum torque has been raised another 100Nm to 600Nm -- 66 per cent up on standard -- and it has an extra 20kW of power, peaking at 180kW -- 50 per cent more than the road-going D-Max.

Good and bad news from the US
A couple of snippets of commercial interest from the US.

The main provider of NASCAR merchandise, Motorsports Authentics, lost US$20.1 million in the first nine months of this year, mainly, it seems, off the back of Dale Earnhardt Junior's horror season in the Sprint Cup. Earnhardt is 23rd in that championship, while Australia's Marcos Ambrose is 18th in his first full season -- and now has season winnings of more than US$4 million.

And the IndyCar series has secured a six-year naming rights sponsorship from clothing brand Izod -- its first title sponsor in almost a decade. Izod, owned by Phillips-Van Heusen Corp (PVH), liked "the combination of young, dynamic drivers representing over 14 countries".

Mike Kelly, PVH vice-president of marketing and creative, said: "If everything was rosy and the series was mature after the unification (of the Indy Racing League and Champ Car series), I'm not sure we could afford it. I think it's right time, right place, and we see upside. If you think of it as a toddler that's on its feet now, that's the kind of position we like. We want to be part of it, because we're not just committed for the short term."

And IndyCar's competition president Brian Barnhart said: "It obviously has been a long time since we've had a title sponsor, and -- to be honest -- it's probably the first legitimate title sponsor we've ever had."

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