MOTORSPORT: It's hotting up on The Mountain

As the lap times tumble, the reality is dawning that – barring a miraculous late U-turn – Ford's days participating in V8 Supercars as a manufacturer are almost at an end.

That's despite the arrival in the sport next year of iconic American team owner Roger Penske in the championship with dual V8 Supercar champion Marcos Ambrose returning from NASCAR to drive for the new union of Penske and Dick Johnson.

Penske is almost on the cusp of a second NASCAR Sprint Cup title in three years with Ford, but it seems that success will count for nothing in terms of Blue Oval motorsport involvement in Australia.

Ford Performance Racing, defending winner of the Bathurst 1000 and pacesetter in practice this year, has been the manufacturer's main representative in V8 Supercars the past decade but its deal expires at the end of this year.

The four FPR entries and two from Penske-DJR will still carry the Blue Oval badge next season on the new FG X, the last Falcon, but seemingly without Ford financial backing – and very limited other factory support.

The legendary Johnson is pleading publicly for a change of heart at Ford, but it will fall on deaf ears. Even Penske's clout with the parent company in Detroit is unlikely to reverse the inevitable withdrawal from Australian motorsport. He instead will have to focus on forging a new manufacturer connection for his second year in V8 Supercars.

There's other pressure building at The Mountain – specifically tyre pressures.

Teams have been warned to adhere to a new regulation stipulating a minimum 17psi in all V8 Supercar tyres at all times.

That's been introduced to stop teams running lower pressures to try to extend the life of the Dunlop rubber. The rule also is intended to avert tyre failures.

Breaches of 2psi or less will incur a drive-through penalty, while anything more could lead to disqualification.

Weather temperatures are rising at Bathurst too, with a top of 26 degrees now forecast for both days of the weekend – but with a 30 per cent chance of showers on Sunday and, the bureau says, "the chance of isolated thunderstorms in the west of the central tablelands".

In the air, too, is talk of Archer Capital moving to acquire the rest of the V8 Supercar business it doesn't already own – it paid about $180 million for 60 per cent 3½ years – while guaranteeing the teams a fixed dividend for the next six years of the new pay-TV contract (with only six championship rounds a year on free-to-air Ten and packaged replays of others).

Important in that could be a resolution of the status of the three Racing Entitlement Contracts (RECs) "parked" this season, which reduced the regular championship field to 25 cars (it's 26 at Bathurst with the NZ wildcard, Super Black Racing). The V8 Supercar organisation and Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport have been at legal loggerheads over LDM's second REC, which the team handed back but has wanted to revive next season, saying it has sponsorship to run a second car again.

Uphill battle in sport's TV 'race'
The rugby league and Australian football grand finals the past two weekends have raised the bar for the Bathurst 1000 in the TV game.

The Bathurst telecast has picked up the past three years after its low point in 2010.

Last year's Great Race had an average audience in the five major state capitals of 1.263 million, but that was still below the 1.357 million of 2007 and 1.49 million in 2002.

The AFL grand final on September 27 had a five-capitals average of 2.813 million and last Sunday's NRL final 2.449 million – and a national peak audience of 4.6 million.

The Seven network will want to attain a good Bathurst number in its final year of telecasting V8 Supercars. So too will the series organisers before next year's switch to Fox-Ten. Seven says that, including in-car cameras in the support races at Mt Panorama, it has 183 cameras in action – 44 on track, four in the pits, one in a helicopter, one pitlane thermal imaging camera, one "fly-cam" covering 450 metres of pitlane, 78 in-car cameras in 13 V8 Supercars, 50 in-car cameras in cars competing in other races, plus four portable field cameras.

Seven also says the race is being broadcast in "over 140 countries" – Australia, plus New Zealand, India, the Middle East, throughout Asia and across Europe and North Africa. No mention there of the Americas, and particularly North America, and even more particularly the United States of America. That is something that ought to be corrected with the new Fox alliance.

In Britain, where the Bathurst 1000 has been screened only on pay TV in recent years, it will be available to 9.2 million households free-to-air this time.

Motorsport-dedicated Motors TV there became a free-to-air service on Thursday.

"We couldn't have picked a better weekend to expand our potential audience," said Motors TV head of programming and acquisitions Frederic Viger.

"We'll be showing V8 Supercars' showpiece event, the Bathurst 1000, live in its entirety. I know that will go down very well indeed!"

Crash shadow lingers over F1's Russian experiment
Formula One is in new territory this weekend – for a street race at Russia's Black Sea resort Sochi, which hosted the Winter Olympics earlier this year –  but it is operating under a dark cloud after Frenchman Jules Bianchi's terrible crash in last Sunday's Japanese GP.

Bianchi remains in a critical condition at a hospital near the Suzuka circuit with a severe head injury – officially called a diffuse axomal injury – after his Marussia car ploughed into a heavy vehicle recovering Adrian Sutil's Sauber, which had crashed a lap earlier.

F1 officials have had a busy week trying to crackdown on vision of Bianchi's crash on social media.

F1 drivers have said this week they are finding it hard to focus on the Sochi event with Bianchi so much in their thoughts.

Australia's Daniel Ricciardo said it had been "a tough week" as Bianchi was the first friend he made when went to Europe.

"To be involved in the [Suzuka] race, to know Jules and to know he is in this condition breaks my heart," Ricciardo said.

Marussia has prepared a new second car for Sochi and has nominated its American test driver, Alex Rossi, to partner regular British driver Max Chilton, but there is no certainty it will run both.

As investigations into Bianchi's crash proceed there has been talk of introducing closed cockpits for F1 cars.

Britain's Autosport.com has revealed that top F1 teams rejected a move last year by the governing Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) towards closed cockpits.

The FIA had come up with a roll structure in front of the driver but Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner was said to have called it "shockingly bad" and then-McLaren chief Martin Whitmarsh "shockingly ugly".

Autosport.com said minutes of a meeting of the F1 Strategy Group last October showed the sport's commercial supremo, Bernie Ecclestone, also was against the "roll cage".

Moves are afoot to relax the freeze on improvements to the new hybrid power units during F1 seasons.

This year's dominant manufacturer team, Mercedes, has opposed any relaxation, saying allowing changes during a season would make the sport even more expensive and compound the problems of battling customer teams.

Ferrari is pushing hard for change though, with its team principal Marco Mattiaci saying: "Our [Ferrari] core business is engine. F1 also stands for innovation and continuous improvement. So, with all the dollars that I invest in innovation, it makes no sense that for one year I cannot touch the engine."

Mattiaci claimed that relaxing the freeze would be "a win for all the stakeholders".

It has been confirmed this week that the struggling Lotus team will switch to Mercedes power next year. It will become Mercedes' third customer team, in place of McLaren – which is reverting to Honda power as the Japanese manufacturer returns to the sport.

There still has not been any announcement of ace Spanish driver Fernando Alonso moving to McLaren-Honda. It seems McLaren chief Ron Dennis wants Alonso to sign a long-term contract, while the two-time world champion – frustrated at not adding a third at Ferrari – may only be prepared to commit for one year, with the possibility of a Mercedes drive in 2016 if Lewis Hamilton were to leave there.