MOTORSPORT: Long hauls but little exposure

The Bathurst 12-Hour and the Daytona 500 are unlikely to attract much public attention in Australia, unless Craig Lowndes wins at Bathurst (in an Audi), unless Marcos Ambrose or Danica Patrick win at Daytona, or there is a huge crash -- highly likely at Daytona.

The average Australian wouldn't know either event was on, yet the Daytona 500 is America's biggest race -- bigger than any other NASCAR round or the Indianapolis 500, and perhaps rivaling the most watched Formula One grands prix.

Waking up this morning your correspondent heard a couple of ABC News Radio sports bulletins, with 10-12 items about seemingly everything except that there is what ought to be, by now, a significant endurance motor race at Australia's most famous and revered circuit.

It is the 10th running of the 12-Hour and, this author has said it before, it's about time it gained some serious traction -- some relevance, not only among motorsport followers but more broadly. Certainly it has an impressive line-up of drivers and machinery this year.

As Auto Action magazine states in its preview, "competing will be the Touring Car Masters, Carrera Cup, Australian GT and V8 ute racing series champions, four former Bathurst 1000 winners, two Australian Touring Car Championship/V8 Supercar champions, two 24 Hours of Le Mans class winners, a Daytona 24-Hour class winner and the winners of the 2012 Dubai 24-Hour and Gulf 12-Hour, just to name a few". It could have added a Formula One driver coach (Rob Wilson), the first Tanzanian driver at Bathurst (Vimal Mehta) and a dual Porsche Supercup champion (Dutchman Jeroen Bleekemolen, also one of the Le Mans class winners).

The Class A GT3 entry list contains two Ferrari 458s, three Audi R8 LMSs looking to follow up last year's one-two finish, and two gullwing Mercedes SLS AMGs and two Lamborghinis.

In all a field of 28 cars, with what has been billed as the biggest influx of international competitors at The Mountain since the 1987 world touring car round which ran with the Bathurst 1000. Excellent ingredients for a motor race at a magic venue. But how many Australians will see or hear much, if anything, about it? Very few, we suspect. Again.

The final 90 minutes of Sunday's race will be broadcast from 4.45 pm on Foxtel's Speed Channel -- and a three-hour highlights package will air on that channel at 7pm on Saturday, March 24.

The website to follow it throughout the weekend is bathurst12hour.com.au and there will be a radio broadcast on 87.8mhZ. 

Since he was third in last weekend's Shootout at the Daytona Speedweeks, Ambrose was fourth fastest in a qualifying session for the 500 and third in one of the two 240km (150-mile) Duels early today, gaining six places on wild the last lap in which Danica Patrick hit the back straight wall, which caused the race to finish under yellow flags.

Ford drivers Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle had already locked in the front row starting positions for the 500, in which the cars have electronic fuel injection instead of NASCAR's traditional carburetors for the first time.

Reigning Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart and Matt Kenseth will start on the second row, with Dale Earnhardt Junior and Regan Smith on the third row, ahead of Ambrose and Johnson.

Shootout winner Kyle Busch will start 14th, Ambrose's new Richard Petty Motorsports teammate Aric Almirola 27th, Patrick 29th, Juan Pablo Montoya 35th and last year's shock young winner Trevor Bayne 40th.

Speed Channel will screen the Daytona 500 live from 4am Monday, eastern Australian summer time, and it will be replayed on One HD.

Although Mercedes reportedly wants to extend 43-year-old Schumacher's contract until 2014, Rosberg has outperformed the seven-time world champion in his comeback since 2010. He is now intent on beating Schumi to be first to win in Mercedes' new W03 car which made its belated debut at this week's pre-season testing in Barcelona.

Although it has 200 more parts than last year's cars which took Mercedes to fourth in the constructors' world championship, the W03 does not appear to have any special developments. It does have a similar stepped nose to those of other teams.

It may be Renault-powered Red Bull that again has something special, following the banning of the blown diffusers it pioneered. Renault's engine chief Jean Francois Caubet has said that his company and Red Bull Racing's brilliant technical director Adrian Newey have "found a solution to compensate for the loss of performance [from the blown diffuser ban]".

When observers noted the Red Bull RB8 cornering as though it was on rails in the first F1 pre-season test at Jerez in Spain, the tycoon who owns the Red Bull drink company Dietrich Mateschitz joked: "That's because we all used to play with model trains."

Newey has said that the exhausts are "one area in which we still have some ideas up our sleeves". However, Autosport has reported that the governing Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) is paying particularly close attention to the technicalities of the new cars, with suspicions that engine mapping configurations are being used to manipulate exhaust gases.

"The issue relates to the extreme possibility of a team trying to make use of a bigger throttle opening than is allowed, to help increase the flow of exhaust gases by inducing a misfire," Autosport said. It claimed that the FIA and the manufacturer, unnamed, had agreed that avenue of development stop.

Meanwhile, the Lotus team -- previously the Renault factory outfit -- pulled out of this week's four-day test after its French driver Romain Grosjean reported a "strange feeling" in its second E20 chassis after just seven laps at Barcelona.

Lotus did not specify what the problem was but it is thought to have been with the engine mounts -- and to be a manufacturing fault rather than a design error. It should be back on track for the final test in early March before the season-opening Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on March 16-18.

Australians Mark Webber and Daniel Ricciardo were generally pleased with their Red Bull RB8 and Toro Rosso STR3 this week, although both missed some track time after what they dismissed as minor technical issues.

Ogier did about 1000km in the car and also used the Super 2000 Skoda Fabia in which he is competing in this year's  WRC as a benchmark.

VW will continue its testing in Spain before the third round of the WRC in Mexico.

Meanwhile, young Australian rally driver Brendan Reeves and his co-driver sister Rhianon Smyth say they will contest the WRC Academy -- a series of six rounds at WRC events for young drivers in identical Ford Fiesta R2s -- even though they are still trying to find $300,000 for the campaign. They were fifth in last year's inaugural Academy. This year's begins at the Rally of Portugal at the end of March. Half the events are on gravel, two on tarmac and one a combination of the two surfaces.

The Australian Rally Championship kicks off next weekend, with the new stadium event at Melbourne's Calder Park.

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