MOTORSPORT: Malaysian Supercar round cancelled

Ongoing legal issues have seen the Virgin Australia Supercars Championship expedition to Malaysia scrapped for 2016.

The championship confirmed this afternoon that the August 12-14 KL City 400 street race had been cancelled and would not be replaced. This leaves a 14-event calendar and a month-long gap between the Ipswich and Sydney Motorsport Park SuperSprints.

The KL race has been mired in a legal dispute between the original promoter, GT Global, and the new promoter, City Motorsports, since the latter was appointed by Kuala Lumpur City Hall to take over the event contract. An injunction brought by the original promoter is not due to be heard until June 30, well after preparation work on the circuit had to begin.

However, Supercars CEO James Warburton insisted the category would press on with plans to race on the streets of the Malaysian capital in 2017 as part of an Asian expansion push.

"We have a four-year agreement to race in Malaysia until the end of 2019 and we look forward to returning to Kuala Lumpur when all the local legal issues have been resolved. We believe this event on the streets of KL will be one not to be missed,” Warburton said in a statement.

"We are absolutely committed to continuing to expand the series into Asia and are currently considering a number of other options to race in the region beyond 2016,” he said.

Indonesia, Japan, Thailand and even a second visit to China have all been rumoured as potential Asian venues for the series.

motoring.com.au understands attempts to get a race on in Malaysia in August continued until last night. Moves to transfer the race to the Sepang F1 circuit fell over because the venue was not available on the August 12-14 dates, while a possible date shift to November also didn’t proceed.

Crucially for the Supercars team, it appears they will still collect at least a substantial portion of the sanctioning fee City Motorsports would have paid for them to perform. But how much financial impact the cancellation has on fans who had booked to go to the race is as yet unknown.

“We apologise to our fans for any inconvenience, but unfortunately this is a matter outside of our control,” Warburton said in the statement.

One fan, Richard Bransdon, was quick to voice his anger over the announcement on the official supercars.com website: “Great. Now I'm down $5000. Thanks heaps you bastards,” he wrote.

This year’s event had appeared doomed from mid-May when the Malaysian newspaper, Free Malaysia Today, reported Kuala Lumpur Mayor Abdul Aziz had confirmed the event would not take place in 2016.

Prior to that there had been widespread criticism of last year’s five-car demonstration race because of the disruption it caused to downtown traffic and the cost to KL City Hall of the circuit’s construction and pull-down.

Warburton flew to Malaysia last month for emergency meetings and returned to Australia positive enough about what he learned to predict a resolution. But that proved a false hope.

“We have been formally advised by the Malaysian promoter that due to ongoing legal action in Malaysia, to which we’re not a party, there is insufficient time to prepare the street circuit in Kuala Lumpur for the event on 12-14 August. The event has therefore been cancelled,” Warburton said in the official statement.

“We explored a number of other options with the Malaysian promoter to ensure this year's race went ahead including moving the event to the Sepang International Circuit but this was simply not possible.”

This is the latest in a lengthening line of failed international forays for Supercars which has previously raced in China, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and the USA without ongoing success.

Initially, the KL race appeared to be a better proposition because it was in a time zone that worked better for local live telecasting and was closer to Australia, encouraging fans to make the trip.

The city venue also had the potential to attract more fans to watch the racing.

International Supercars outings have previously been conducted at purpose-built racing circuits in front of crowds that varied from acceptable to infinitesimal.

The KL cancellation is the second blow to Supercars in the last month, coming on top of Volvo’s decision to withdraw its backing from the championship at the end of the 2016 season.

Balancing the bad news are the positives of announcing Virgin Australia as its five-year naming rights sponsors and racing that has been spectacularly good with nine winners in 11 races.