MOTORSPORT: Indy plusses and minuses

Briscoe's talents have been little known to many Australians because most of his racing has been overseas -- although a fleeting appearance in V8 Supercars with Holden Racing Team a couple of years ago gave Aussie fans a snapshot of his brilliance. So it's great that Briscoe won at Indy in front of a huge Aussie crowd and his family, friends and supporters in a Honda-engined car.

It was a non-championship race for the Indy Racing League, but in so many ways it was worth countless points to Briscoe -- mostly as a lead-in to 2009, which will be his second open-wheeler season with Team Penske. This was his third win for that mighty outfit in his first season with it in the IRL. The first had come at the Milwaukee Mile oval (a week after he'd inadvertently taken Danica Patrick out of the Indianapolis 500), and the second on the Mid-Ohio road course.

What summed up Briscoe's performance at Surfers' Paradise for us was something said by second-placed Scott Dixon, the Brisbane-born New Zealander who won this year's Indy 500 and the Indy Racing League title ahead of Briscoe's teammate, Brazilian Helio Castroneves.

"Briscoe is one of the guys who can put races together," Dixon said.

Very succinct, but that just about says it all.

Unfortunately that ability is not something we've seen from Will Power on those same Gold Coast streets. We share the devastation Power and the fans felt at his self-inflicted demise yesterday after dominating the weekend until the 16th lap of the race, but the reality is he has had pole position at this event the past three years and goes away yet again without a win. And this time there is absolutely nobody else to blame but himself.

Power, more than anyone, knows the significance of that.

The IndyCars may not, probably won't, be back at the Gold Coast next year -- and that casts a huge cloud over the whole future of the Team Australia project. Entrepreneur Craig Gore has been the man behind that project, and has reputedly pumped $20 million into KV Racing Technologies doing it.

The K stands for Kevin Kalkhoven, the expatriate Aussie who bankrolled the Champ Car series until it was amalgamated with the IRL this year, and the V is for Jimmy Vasser, the former top Indy/Champ Car driver who brings the racing expertise to the ownership. Team Australia is not so much a team as a sponsorship which has made Power's career in the US possible.

"I can tell you now if there's no IRL on the Gold Coast, there's no Team Australia," Gore said at the weekend.

Now some would say that Gore might be looking for an exit anyway in light of the global financial meltdown (He folded his V8 Supercar team on the eve of this season, and no longer has the sponsorship on the V8 Supercar pace car) but without him KV Racing's budget next year will be half what it has been this year.

Vasser said at the Gold Coast that KV was chasing sponsorship for 2009 and thus had no time line for making any driver lineup announcements.

Now that does not sound good for Power, which is a great pity as the guy is a very accomplished racer -- more accomplished, generally, than yesterday's error indicated. But that mistake could prove very costly; it could not have come at a worse time for him.

And it was compounded by KV's other driver, Spaniard Oriol Servia, finishing fifth. Too often this season Servia has shown himself to be the better man at getting the car home.

As Dixon said of Briscoe, so might he say of Servia -- "one of the guys who can put races together". Not as well as Briscoe, as in winning races, but in getting to the finish.

And the old adage is that to finish first, first you have to finish.

What a flop Danica Patrick was
Danica Patrick was a massive disappointment at the Gold Coast. So much had been said, seen and heard of her this year.

Patrick was the first woman to win a "major league" open-wheeler race -- the IRL round at Japan's Motegi circuit just weeks before the Indy 500. And a couple of years ago she was unlucky not to win the Indy 500.

What the weekend just gone told us is that she can't drive on road circuits. She started at the back of the field and finished next to last. What a letdown after such expectations.

We had anticipated that she would have captivated Australia in the week leading in to the race as the speed queen who had appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine.

Pardon us if we missed something, and certainly we didn't get to see a lot of TV throughout last week, but we didn't notice her in the news south of the Tweed River before the weekend -- and her performance on the track was mitigating against her attracting any additional attention to the event. It's no surprise that Honda is not going ahead with a Formula 1 test for her.

It would have been only a publicity stunt anyway, but -- for all her carry-on against Ryan Briscoe at Indianapolis and some other antics -- the reality has dawned in the second half of this season that Danica Patrick is an oval racer. That's the start and finish of her.

Bit of a pity that, because a super-competitive woman racer would genuinely spice up any race series.

For all the hype of the weekend, we note that nobody dared face up, publicly, to the point we have been making here for more than a year -- that the problem with the Gold Coast Indy is that the TV audience in the US is miniscule. And it was for that US TV market that the event was created 18 years ago.

It will be a few days before we get the US TV figures for the weekend's race. They may have been helped a little this year by the unification of the IRL and Champ Car, but on the other hand, they may have been adversely affected by the race being non-championship (and run weeks after the conclusion of the IRL series on American soil).

Here, again, are the number of US households that have watched the Gold Coast Indy the past 13 years:

Year - US households reached
1995 - 2,390,000
1996 - 1,865,000                   
1997 - 1,351,000                   
1998 - 718,000                   
1999 - 445,000                   
2000 - 576,000                   
2001 - 382,000                   
2002 - 118,000                   
2003 - 97,000                   
2004 - 210,000                   
2005 - 92,000                   
2006 - 125,000    
2007 -- 121,000

Up until 1997 the Gold Coast Indy's feature race was on network television in the US, and we can see from these figures (provided to us by the authorative RaceFax electronic newsletter service run by Forrest Bond) it had an audience of millions of households then. Since 1998 the Gold Coast race has been screened on cable television in the US and the audience has shrunk.

Now note that these US figures are for households, unlike Australia where we talk in terms of viewer numbers. We reckon it is fair enough to at least double the figures in our table above to get a realistic idea of the number of Americans viewing the race.

By doing that we are saying the average number of viewers in households tuned into the Gold Coast Indy in the US is two. Considering the race is on at unfriendly hours, we reckon that estimate is fair enough; perhaps even charitable.

So if that brings us to a US viewing audience of around 250,000 for the race these days it means that, in a country of 300 million people, the telecast is getting to only 1/1200th of the population. That is the crux of the problem, and why the race does not make sense to the IRL. It is also why the race has next to no value for the sponsors of the series or the participating teams.

That is why there is no future for the IRL on the Gold Coast... Certainly not as part of the IRL championship.

The IRL's top priority is rebuilding open-wheeler racing within America, and finishing its championship there by September to avoid clashes with other major sports.

Gold Coast Indy chairman Terry Mackenroth says it is not essential that the Queensland event be part of the IRL championship. But for it to make any sense it probably needs to be part of something -- perhaps an off-season IndyCar series outside the US.

Even then how does it make any more commercial sense? The bottom line is: how is it going to get to a whole lot more than 120,000-125,000 US households? If it can't it (the Indy component of the Gold Coast Indy) has got no future -- i.e. it's dead.

For the record, our previous scribblings on this hot potato are contained here, here and here.

A very different language on the Gold Coast
The Gold Coast is a bit different, quite a bit different, to the rest of Australia in some ways. We've never bought a dictionary in Surfers' Paradise or thereabouts, but maybe the dictionaries sold there have a different definition of growth to that generally accepted.

We read with interest quotes in the Gold Coast Bulletin newspaper attributed to the Indy's communications director, Brett Murray.

Bulletin writer Pat McLeod quoted Murray saying: "Since 1998 this event has reported continued growth."

When our old mate Brett reads the US TV figures table above he must be reversing the second column. How else do you make that table into a growth story?

McLeod wrote that an estimated 1.4 million Australian viewers saw Indy on Channel 7. We'll await some figures and analysis -- beyond the usual 7 propaganda sheet -- on that one.

If it was 1.4 million it would mean that one in every 18.5 Australians watched the race (highly unlikely) and there would have been probably five or six times as many people watching in Oz as in the US. And McLeod added in his Bulletin article: "Many millions more watched the international feed of the race on ESPN."

Now will Mr McLeod, or anyone else in south-east Queensland, be chasing up anything like exact numbers in coming days? And, if so, what efforts might they make to verify any numbers they obtain?

Communications man Murray also told McLeod: "This event is going nowhere. [We trust he meant is not moving!]... This carnival will still be here."

We're sure it will be. The V8 Supercars are already locked in for another five years. It's really only a matter of finding an alternative international open-wheeler category, presuming that no way -- even a bigger truckload of money -- is found for the IRL to return.

The Queensland government has made it clear that its preferred position is to keep the IndyCars but that, if that's not possible, talks have started with alternatives.

As much as it is decried, we can't see that there is any serious alternative open-wheeler category than the A1 GP. And we note that Australia's A1 GP frontman Alan Jones, the 1980 Formula 1 world champion, was reiterating at the weekend that A1 was "ready, willing and able" to be on the Gold Coast in the preferred late October slot.

"Our cars lap three to four seconds quicker than the IRL cars going around the Gold Coast," Jones told Brisbane's Sunday Mail.

"The whole idea of an Indy race on the Gold Coast was to promote the Gold Coast and Queensland to the world. But the race isn't even telecast in the US... We have 25 countries competing, we have ...  the race being shown on television in 155-plus countries.

"And many of the countries are in the preferred trading area for Australia -- Asia and the Middle East."

Now, Jonesey, the Indy is telecast into the US. It's just not watched by enough people there to make it worthwhile. And Jonesey is opening a pandora's box by referring to A1 GP's global TV footprint.

The reality is, though, that for the Gold Coast it may need to be A1 or nothing. At a stretch A1 could be called a credible alternative -- just don't call it a viable alternative.

But for the Queensland government and the Gold Coast Indy organisers it may be a case of something (international open-wheeler) being better than nothing.

In the big picture V8 Supercars don't have equality
It's a few years now that the V8 Supercars have shared joint top billing with the international open-wheelers at the Gold Coast. Well, supposedly they have. And, at the track, it's fair to say that there is equal, indeed probably more, interest in the V8 Supercars than the IndyCars. But in the overall scheme of things that's not the case.

The projection of the event in the Australian media, particularly away from the Gold Coast, still focuses much more on the open-wheeler race than the V8s (and overseas there is next to no mention of the V8s). Although the V8s had three races on the Surfers' Paradise streets over the weekend, Jamie Whincup's clean sweep of those races did not garner the same attention as Ryan Briscoe winning one IndyCar race.

It must be said that Whincup did a brilliant job, especially after the disastrous round he had there last year.

So he gets a surfboard trophy like that Triple 8/Team Vodafone teammate Craig Lowndes already had and which he had so admired.

"Pole position and three race wins, you couldn't do anything more," Whincup said.

"For me, it was the only 'major' I hadn't had success with. I put Indy in that major category -- up there with Bathurst, Clipsal 500 and Sandown (now Phillip Island) ... I guess I would say it is another tick in the box for something I wanted to achieve in this category."

We always had a gut feeling that -- in the national sporting landscape -- the V8 Supercar races at the Gold Coast were going to suffer from something of a post-Bathurst hangover. And so it was.

Great credit to Holden Racing Team's Garth Tander and Ford Performance Racing's Mark Winterbottom for filling the podium positions alongside Whincup in each race.

But is that sameness what the category needed? Most certainly not. What it showed, however, is that that trio are the class of the field at the minute. So three rounds to go now: Bahrain, Symmons Plains in Tasmania and Oran Park.

Even though we question the benefits of the Bahrain round, other than to the coffers of V8 Supercars Australia, the television pictures from there are excellent, Tassie will be tought and tight, and the Oran Park finale ought to be something special.

With everything else out of the way -- the Formula 1 season ends next Monday morning in Brazil. It should make for a gripping finish to the V8 Supercar Championship.

V8 Supercar Championship standings after 11 of 14 rounds: Jamie Whincup (Ford) 2616 points, Mark Winterbottom (F) 2541, Garth Tander (Holden) 2510, Craig Lowndes (F) 2103, Will Davison (F) 2033, Steve Richards (F) 1988, Rick Kelly (H) 1940, James Courtney (F) 1906, Russell Ingall (H) 1666, Steve Johnson (F) 1649.

White powder, F1 farewells, and reading matter
We'll turn our attention to the Brazilian F1 finale in our next column later in the week. Before then we should just mention though that a court at Modena in Italy, near Ferrari's Maranello heeadquarters, has found that there was an attempt to sabotage the Prancing Horse before last year's Monaco Grand Prix -- and the man being blamed is Nigel Stepney, who was at the centre of the Spygate affair.

A Modena magistrate named Stepney as the person most likely to have placed white powder in the fuel tank of Kimi Raikkonen's F2007 car. The powder was supposedly a mixture of food supplements and vitamins, which it is said could have made the car's engine seize had it not been detected.

Traces of the powder were found on Stepney's work trousers and in his house, but his lawyer still protests his innocence, saying the accusations are "vague and inexact".

Brazil this weekend may be the last GP for Rubens Barrichello and certainly will be for David Coulthard.

As much as Coulthard has been a popular figure in F1 for so long, Red Bull Racing chief Christian Horner has fired a few parting barbs at DC.

"David has unfortunately had a disappointing year," Horner said.

"Before this year he'd had only a couple of accidents with Red Bull Racing. I think this year he has had 10 -- and that has cost us and David very dearly in points... Too often we have been relying on one car (Aussie Mark Webber's) and that's been very hard for us."

We also came across another interesting piece on Red Bull Racing's season and it's here
Even more interesting is a suggestion that Toyota may quit F1 in favor of a Le Mans campaign. That's here

And, reverting back to V8 Supercars, a report from New Zealand, following up on an article to which we referred last week, that Team Kiwi and Ford NZ have split is here

Image: Jim Haines for indycar.com

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