MOTORSPORT: Interest in racing on the wane

Formula One team Sauber is on the financial ropes, and it would be no surprise if another one or two – one of them even older than Sauber – were facing similar difficulties.

From the US we learn that the NASCAR-owning France family’s International Speedway Corporation has reduced the capacity of its tracks by 17 per cent over the past five years.

The famous Daytona International Speedway, which once had 168,000 grandstand seats, will seat only 101,000 people by 2016.

Other American tracks are cutting capacity by at least a quarter of what it was in 2007.

“The lack of ticket sales can’t all be traced to people preferring to watch races from home in the air-conditioning while supplementing the experience with their laptop, tablet and phone – some interest in the sport has to have waned,” writes Bob Pockrass of Sporting News.

One positive announcement this week has been the addition of a 10th city to next year’s new global Formula E Championship – although Australia is not part of it, and electric racing may not turn out to be captivating for fans.

There are grounds for concern about the interest levels in Australian motorsport too.

This should be a big weekend for rallying, with an international event in Queensland – a round of the Asia-Pacific Rally Championship in the Sunshine Coast hinterland and Mary Valley. It’s also a round of the Australian Rally Championship and the Queensland Rally Championship among other things.

There are competitors from at least eight countries and a fine array of car brands – Skoda, Proton, Honda, Renault, Mazda, Volkswagen as well as the more expected Subarus, Mitsubishis, Fords and Toyotas.

It starts tonight at the Nambour Showgrounds but it is easy to fear there will be little interest or attention on the event, other than in the immediate area and among rallying enthusiasts - even with a post-competition stop at the Ettamogah Pub on Saturday evening - unless there is vision or photographs of a spectacular crash.

The top international drivers in the field – Indians Guarav Gill and Sanjay Takale,  22-year-old Finnish champion Esapekka Lappi, Japan’s Hiroshi Asakura and New Zealand’s Michael Young – are little known among Australian motorsport fans, let alone the broader Oz sporting or general public.

Australia’s Asia-Pacific champion last year with Skoda, Chris Atkinson, is missing this time.

The revamp of the ARC the past couple of years has not gained traction with media and the public and its top drivers – Eli Evans, Scott Pedder and youngster Brendan Reeves, who has been having some success in America recently -- remain low-profile.

Then there’s the V8 Supercar Championship, a third of the way into another three-week gap in its calendar.

The introduction of the Car of the Future regulations has seen the arrival of Nissans and AMG Mercedes to compete with Holdens and Fords, and Volvos are on the way next year.

However, after a spike in interest and TV audience at the season-opening Clipsal 500 in Adelaide there is no evidence – certainly not easily available - that the V8 Supercars are troubling the OzTAM scorers any more than Australia’s top batsmen have has been doing with cricket scorers in recent times.

V8 Supercars has had a new chief executive (it’s fourth in five years) for several weeks – James Warburton.

Warburton is a man with a lot of experience in the TV industry, having been sales supremo at Seven and network chief at Ten – although he departed both acrimoniously.

Warburton has been spotted lunching recently with former colleagues at Seven, the network telecasting the V8 Supercar Championship at a considerably smaller rights fee than previously.

Warburton was quoted in the Australian Financial Review this week on his visions for the series.

He talked of twilight and night racing for prime-time TV, dropping long-time executive chairman Tony Cochrane’s planned major international expansion and perhaps consolidating the calendar of Australian events.

Just weeks earlier Warburton talked, at the Volvo announcement, of his “vision to build V8 Supercars into one of the strongest brands in the world with the partners to match – that is the level of untapped potential I believe this sport has”.

That sounded a lot like the days when John Elliott was going to Foster-ise the world with Australian beer.

But surely there is a contradiction here – how will Warburton achieve “one of the strongest brands in the world” if not racing increasingly on the world stage?

Warburton quite rightly has said that V8 Supercars is in “a period of consolidation”.

Evidence of that is the financial disbursements the teams now receive from Archer Capital majority-owned V8 central – zero – and that state governments that have heavily subsidized V8 Supercar events for years are now very seriously questioning the bang they get for their bucks and tightening the purse-strings.

Warburton has admitted that the V8 Supercar business is “quite weak” but claimed the sport was doing brilliantly.

Yet this is not reflected in TV figures – and without that it’s hard to see any network seriously entertaining the idea of screening V8 Supercars in prime time.

As Warburton well knows, TV networks want ratings winners.

And then there’s the question of who would foot the bill for lights if there were to be full night racing?

Tony Cochrane tried telling Adelaide a couple of years ago it could lose its “pole position” on the V8 Supercar Championship if it didn’t cough up the kanga for lights.

It didn’t embrace the idea (and cost) of lights – yet has stayed just where it is on the calendar.

So if events, cities or governments won’t pay for lighting, will V8 Supercars itself? Hardly likely when it’s telling teams it doesn’t have enough to pay them dividends now.

Incidentally, the minimum weight for V8 Supercars has just been increased to 1410kg because of some teams struggling to make the previous 1400kg.

The category’s general manager of motorsport Damien White said that, particularly in these financially-challenging times, “one of the major contributing factors” to the change was that it was cheaper to add 10kg than take 10kg out of some.

The FIA has banned everyone other than marshals and team crews in F1 pitlanes during qualifying and races.

It also is fast-tracking cuts in pitlane speed limits and mandating the wearing of helmets by team members involved in pitstops.

These latter changes had been planned for next season anyway, but FIA president Jean Todt asked the World Motor Sport Council to approve earlier implementation.

While the pitlane speed at most tracks is being reduced from 100kmh to 80kmh, at Melbourne’s Albert Park and Monaco next year – and Singapore this September – it will be only 60km/h.

Red Bull Racing has said that its problem in Germany was that the right rear wheel gun man’s thumb accidentally triggered a “go” signal, which meant Webber’s car was released early.

Red Bull has promised to revise the design of its wheel guns.
Meanwhile, Swiss team Sauber has admitted that it is not paying its suppliers on time – and there have been reports that its talented young German driver Nico Hulkenberg will depart.

Sauber has been run in recent times by F1’s only woman team principal, Monisha Kaltenborn, also a one-third owner, but it was 69-year-old team founder Peter Sauber who did the talking this week.

“It is very difficult at the moment – our resources are very limited. The situation is uncomfortable and embarrassing … very stressful … painful,” Sauber said.

“Time is the big problem. We might not be able to drive (compete) if suppliers begin to stop supplying us.”

Sauber admitted that the team may have to be sold, “but we are far from that (yet)”.

“There is nothing else to do than fight,” he said.

Sauber is only eighth in the F1 constructors’ championship this season with just seven points.

The longer-established and once-mighty Williams team is in an even worse position, without a point after nine races this season after breaking its long victory drought last year with Pastor Maldonado’s win in the Spanish GP.

American Morgan Shepherd, who raced at Bob Jane’s Calder Park Thunderdome in Melbourne years ago, this weekend is set to become the oldest driver to start a NASCAR Sprint Cup race – at 71!

There are 43 places in the field for the event at New Hampshire Motor Speedway – and 43 entries. So Shepherd is assured a start unless there is a late entry.

Shepherd made his Cup debut in 1970 and last competed at the top level of American stock car racing in 2006.

The oldest Cup starter to date was Jim Fitzgerald at 65 – at Riverside in California in 1987.

Australian Marcos Ambrose is confident of a good result on the flat New Hampshire track at Loudon, having had been in contention for a win on the banked Daytona track last weekend before he was bumped out of it.

IndyCar in America somehow thinks it can survive without a chief executive, with the position left vacant by high-profile Randy Bernard at the end of last year still not filled – and it’s not going to be.

The Hulman family business that owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the centerpiece of Indy racing, says it is moving to a “more function-oriented structure”.

It installed former team owner Derrick Walker as president of IndyCar operations and competition a couple of months ago and is planning a $100 million upgrade of the Speedway – or “Brickyard”.

IndyCar organisers are hopeful they can run this weekend’s double-header round on the streets of Toronto smoothly after massive storms in the Canadian city during the week.

The two Toronto races will have standing starts – a first in Indy racing.
Apart from Team Penske’s two-time Toronto winner Will Power, fellow Australian Ryan Briscoe is driving again for Panther Racing.

Briscoe finished second in Toronto for Penske in 2009.

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