MOTORSPORT: Let the champagne flow

And the winners are ... motorsport and the fans
Lots to celebrate in motorsport today -- the success of the new V8 Supercar round in New Zealand, and for Holden fans the eighth straight year of triumph in the Shaky Isles; Australian Will Power winning the final Champ Car race, a woman, Danica Patrick, winning an Indy race; and the unsung Steve Glenney winning Targa Tasmania.

And Marcos Ambrose has notched his best finish in three seasons in NASCAR, with second place at the Nationwide Series race in Mexico City.

It must be said, though, that Whincup somehow maintained particularly good humour throughout the weekend.

Garth Tander (pictured) resumed the normal service we came to expect from him in winning last year's championship by taking all three races at Hamilton. A mighty fine effort from Tander, doing it in the style it ought to be done -- qualify well, get away cleanly, set a cracking pace, stay out of trouble and don't make mistakes.

Ford drivers Steven Richards and James Courtney took the other spots on the podium, while fourth-placed Rick Kelly assumes the championship lead -- 46 points clear of Tander and 92 in front of Lee Holdsworth.

And Mark Winterbottom is now the leading Ford driver, exactly 100 points behind Kelly, while Whincup (who went to NZ with a mammoth lead) finds himself 132 points behind Holden's 2006 champion.

As much as we admire Tander winning in the way he does, we respect Rick Kelly's ability to put a championship together. He copped a lot of criticism for winning the title two years ago without winning races, and indeed the pointscoring system was changed to try to avert that happening again, but Kelly's consistency with top-five finishes is to be admired.

It was to be expected that a Kiwi would excel at Hamilton. History suggested it would be Greg Murphy, who had won four of the seven years at Pukekohe, but he had what he admitted was "a shocker" of a weekend.

Like Murphy, Steven Richards was born in NZ although he came to Australia as a kid in short pants, but the Kiwis can still lay legitimate claim to him.

We predicted here at the end of last week that Shane Van Gisbergen could be the Kiwi to watch and his performance was commendable, especially in his dicing with Mark Skaife and Russell Ingall.

But the Kiwi standout for the weekend was Fabian Coulthard in another Falcon for the Glenfords/Paul Cruickshank Racing Team. Coulthard finished in the top eight in each race, wound up fifth for the weekend and distinguished himself by passing Winterbottom and Rick Kelly round the outside at Turn One.

This is a fillip not only for a driver in his first full season of V8 Supercar racing and the young team that John Bowe raced for in his farewell season but the series -- and confirms our belief that the series ought to be built very much as an Australasian or trans-Tasman championship.

The crowds were massive, genuinely approaching 180,000 for the weekend, it seems, and reinforced our view that NZ ought to have at least two rounds a year. The TV pictures, in the main, were excellent, although the track was a bit Mickey Mouse.

V8 Supercars Australia chief executive Wayne Cattach has already admitted that perhaps an Adelaide-style two-race format, each of 250km, is probably better for Hamilton -- and the new Townsville street event due to be added to the calendar next year.

Despite our oft-repeated reservations about the financials with street races there's no doubt they are popular with the punters.

Finally on Hamilton, we must say we were amused by a report in the New Zealand Herald  in which reporter Eric Thompson wrote that each V8 Supercar event "is beamed to 830 million people in 130 countries".

We don't know where Eric got his info, but he's massively overstated things there.

Despite some of the fantasy figures bandied about by motorsport promoters, we reckon Eric would be a lot closer to reality if he divided that number by 100, which would give him 8.3 million.

There's no direct evidence -- although cynics may have suspicions - that Eric has had this 830 million rammed down his throat by anyone in a V8SA shirt, but -- on increasingly credible research -- that would mean a V8 Supercar round is seen by somewhere between 10 and 20 times the number of viewers of Formula 1 grands prix.

Since we read Eric's number in the NZ Herald last Wednesday we've been thinking that perhaps it is about time that people putting about crowd and TV audiences in motorsport -- the originators of these numbers much more so than those such as media types gullible enough to accept and repeat them -- need to licensed in the same way that people are in financial markets. That may be a way of injecting a bit of truth serum to the counting.

New Zealand round points: Garth Tander 300, Steve Richards 270, James Courtney 252, Rick Kelly 240, Fabian Coulthard 192, Mark Winterbottom 190, Cameron McConville 172, Lee Holdsworth 154, Craig Lowndes 138.

V8 Supercar Championship standings after 3 of 14 rounds: Rick Kelly (Holden) 672 points, Garth Tander (H) 626, Lee Holdsworth (H) 580, Mark Winterbottom (Ford) 572, Jamie Whincup (F) 540, Steve Richards (F) 521, Craig Lowndes (F) 477, Todd Kelly (H) 440, Will Davison (F) 438, Fabian Coulthard (F) 431.

"When it comes together, it comes together nicely. Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!" exclaimed Power after a series of spectacular donuts in his yellow and green car entered by KV Racing.

As flawed as the Championship Auto Racing Teams/CART/Champ Car concept has been for three decades, it has had its magic moments and personalities -- and it's terrific to see Power leave his indelible mark on it.

It was a strange top-six finishing order at Long Beach -- behind Power came Franck Montagny for Conquest Racing, Mario Dominguez for Pacific Coast Motorsports, Enrique Bernoldi for Conquest, Oriol Servia for KV Racing, and Franck Perera for Conquest.

Three rookies -- Montagny, Bernoldi and Perera -- were among the six. Perhaps that (and Paul Tracy in 11th in what may have been his last serious open-wheeler outing, and neither of the Newman-Haas-Lanigan drivers, Justin Wilson and Graham Rahal, featured at the finish) says it all about Champ Car at the end of its tortured road.

Just hours earlier Andretti Green's Danica Patrick gave Indy racing the shot in the arm it craved.

No longer just the woman who led a few laps of the Indianapolis 500 three years ago, featured on the front of Sports Illustrated magazine in a swimsuit a few months ago and had been branded "the Anna Kournikova of auto racing", 26-year-old Patrick finally has genuine credibility as a racer after winning at her 50th start. In a way it was a pity that her victory came in Japan while most of the American audience slept.

But with the Indy 500 now just a month away, and the single-seater fraternity reunited after 12 largely disastrous years, it is a dream come true.

Alas already the talk is growing that the only way Patrick will really "make it" in the US will be to go to NASCAR. As much as we love NASCAR racing, surely it would be sufficient for Patrick to be the centerpiece of the revival of open-wheeler racing in the States.

For the record, her victory at Motegi came by overtaking Team Penske's Helio Castroneves with two laps of the 200 laps to go. Castroneves was conserving fuel to ensure he made it to the chequered flag.

Aussie Ryan Briscoe in the other Penske car finished only ninth -- and that was his best result to date this year, while Castroneves has been in the top five at all three rounds.

New Zealander Scott Dixon had pitted for fuel at Motegi while leading with five laps to go and Dan Wheldon and Tony Kanaan came in a lap later.

So it could be said Patrick was lucky, but the sport is even luckier to have a woman in victory lane at a major race.

And at Long Beach, where Patrick was being rushed in the hours after her Japanese victory, another woman, Simona De Silvestro, won in the Atlantic series.

A bit of a slap in the face for old Bernie Ecclestone, who reckoned a couple of years back that women belonged in white and in kitchens "with all the other appliances".

The South Australian, at other times a horse trainer, has excelled at his few outings in the Australian Rally Championship and is a driver deserving of greater opportunities -- particularly with a manufacturer. Perhaps an appropriate opportunity might now be forthcoming.

Check out our separate Targa report here for more information.

There was friction over the way Ambrose disposed of rival Boris Said, but that's NASCAR racing. The dual V8 Supercar champion rises from 17th to 13th in the Nationwide Series -- and the challenge for him now is to repeat this performance on an oval track.

Kyle Busch, who our mate Mike Brudenell -- the Australian motorsport writer for the Detroit Free Press -- rates so highly, scored his third straight Nationwide victory in a Toyota, passing the Dodge of Scott Pruett with nine laps remaining and finishing almost a second ahead of Ambrose's Ford Fusion.

It was Busch's 14th win in NASCAR's secondary series but his first on a road course.

Pruett, who lost in Mexico last year in heartbreaking fashion when teammate and eventual race winner Juan Pablo Montoya spun him out late in the race, was third.

MAX BATTLES ON
We're pleased to have been able to leave it until last, but no motorsport wrap at the minute could be complete without mention of Max Mosley's battle to retain the presidency of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) in the wake of his sex scandal.

While it must not be forgotten that the only support Mosley really needs is that of the FIA Senate, which is to meet in Paris on June 3, the calls continue for the 68-year-old to do the honorable thing and go.

Mosley has said -- in an interview with London's Sunday Telegraph -- that he intends to quit at the end of his term late next year anyway, contrary to indications just months ago, and that "it's not a matter for old drivers" like world champion Sir Jackie Stewart and Jody Scheckter to determine his future.

"I feel that with me nothing's changed," he said. "I see it (the exposure of his orgy in the News of the World) as an awful intrusion into my private life which is not justifiable by any means, and which I hope will now be punished."

Arrogant old Max just doesn't get it that people see him as the offender. And now Porsche and Volkswagen, in the process of consummating a merger, have ruled out entering F1, saying the costs and the Mosley scandal make it unattractive to them.

Even Mark Webber has weighed in, telling BBC Sport that F1 "simply cannot have scandals of this type".

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Ambrose image courtesy of BAM Media