MOTORSPORT: Loud noise about F1 hush

AGP Corporation chairman Ron Walker says the much quieter machines breach Melbourne’s contract to stage a world championship round and short-changed fans.

Walker said he had discussed the matter with F1 commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone hours after Sunday’s season-opening GP at Melbourne’s Albert Park and “it’s got to change” for next year, the last of Victoria’s existing F1 contract.

Ecclestone long has been a critic of the regulations that have introduced turbocharged 1.6-litre V6 engines with hybrid technology, calling them “absurd” and “a farce” and arguing that noise is a key element of F1.

The rules were made by the Paris-based Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) headed by Frenchman Jean Todt, who was the Ferrari team principal in its heyday with Michael Schumacher.

The FIA is committed to making F1 more relevant to everyday cars.

But AGPC chief executive Andrew Westacott said “the chemistry” of the new era was not right.

“We pay for a product, we’ve got contracts in place. We are looking at those very, very seriously, because we reckon there has probably been some breaches,” Westacott said.

While fans at the track at the weekend clearly were disappointed at the huskier sound of the new cars, the irony is that Sunday’s race drew a significantly better Australian TV audience.

The average 1.347 million viewers in the five major state capitals for the telecast on Channel Ten and its associate One was up 111,000 – or almost 9 per cent – on last year.

That interest may have been because of new Australian star Daniel Ricciardo starting on the front of the grid and finishing second – a position since stripped in a fuel row, with an appeal hearing due before the Malaysian GP on March 28-30.

Another irony is that Walker had known for a long time this year’s engines would lack the usual shriek, even threatening in mid-2011 to organise a boycott by F1 circuit promoters of them.

He was quoted by F1 business journalist Christian Sylt on June 26, 2011, saying the eco-friendly 2014 engines “would be like a tin can rattling”.

“We are going to have our customer base destroyed. I told them that the circuits would not run it. The sound is part of the brand,” Walker said then.

Walker even talked of running IndyCar instead of F1 in Melbourne, but those American open-wheelers are turbocharged and quieter too.

Yet another irony of the latest fuss is that the legal move mooted by the AGP over its contract would be against the empire headed by Ecclestone, with whom Walker boasts a close friendship.

The pair have been negotiating a contract extension for the Melbourne race, which could hardly proceed under the existing rules now that the AGP has made its dislike of them so public.

The event already is subsidised more than $50 million a year by Victorian taxpayers.

Walker said demonstration laps at Albert Park last weekend by Paul Stoddart’s two-seater F1 car built in the 1990s with a V10 engine could be heard kilometres away, yet people at the circuit could barely hear this year’s cars.

“We are resolving that with Bernie,” Walker told Melbourne’s Age newspaper.
“It’s clearly in breach of our contract.

“It’s not what we paid for. It’s going to change.

“He (Ecclestone) is horrified about it. It will be an issue for all [F1] promoters around the world.

“If you sat in the grandstand you could hardly hear them coming down the straight.

“We [AGPC] are an entertainment company and we have to entertain the public.
“Everybody was talking about it.

“When you take the excitement away you have trouble selling tickets.

“You have to create demand and part of that demand is people liking the noise of the race cars.”

However, the AGPC’s crowd figures at the weekend indicated attendance was only slightly down on last year.

Ambrose finished fifth in the fourth race of the season at the short Bristol oval in Tennessee that was interrupted for six hours by rain and finished behind a pace car.

Fords filled four of the top five places, with Carl Edwards the victor ahead of Ricky Stenhouse Junior, Ambrose’s teammate Aric Almirola and the Chevrolet of three-time series champion Tony Stewart.

Ambrose went a lap down at one stage but regained it and his fifth place has moved him up to 15th in the championship.

He and Almirola gave Richard “The King” Petty’s struggling team its best results in more than a decade.

British-based Aussie David Brabham finished second in the 12-hour sports car race at Sebring in Florida where his father Sir Jack clinched the first of his three F1 world titles 55 years ago.

Brabham shared a Honda Performance Development ARX-03b and led the race at times.

The event was won by a Daytona prototype Ford EcoBoost Riley entered by dominant American team owner Chip Ganassi.

Ryan Briscoe from Sydney finished 19th in a Chevrolet Corvette he shared with Dane Jan Magnussen, father of F1 rookie Kevin who was classified second in Sunday’s Australian GP on debut with McLaren after the disqualification of Daniel Ricciardo’s Red Bull-Renault.

A third Aussie in the American sports car classic, James Davison, was 47th in the Aston Martin V12 Vantage he shared.

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