MOTORSPORT: New superstar on V8 horizon

Supercross icon Chad Reed, one of Australia's highest-earning sportsmen on the back of his massive success in the US, will be given a serious test in one of Team Vodafone's Ford Falcons in August.

Reed says he is tied up until August 10 but he and Team Vodafone are trying to find a suitable date for the test before the Sandown and Bathurst endurance races.

Apart from its regular stars, Craig Lowndes (pictured) and Jamie Whincup, the team has already lined up for the enduros Allan Simonsen - the Danish touring car ace who competes a lot in Australia, particularly in tarmac rallies now -- and Richard Lyons -- an Irishman who has mainly raced open-wheelers but came to Oz for the V8 long-distance races last year.

It is early days yet, but what's to say that Reed might not be drafted into the squad if his testing form warrants it or either of the internationals can't make Sandown or Bathurst for any reason.

Reed drove a few laps in a Paul Morris Holden Commodore V8 Supercar in Queensland last year, ahead of the Gold Coast Indy, but he talks about the planned serious drive of a Team Vodafone Falcon in a lengthy interview with Auto Action editor-at-large Mark Fogarty in today's edition of that magazine.

Reed has featured on BRW magazine's Rich List of Australia's top sports earners for several years -- with reported annual income of about $8 million -- and knows that coming home to race on four wheels would mean a big pay cut for him.

However, the 25-year-old's attitude is that he is already financially set up for life and that satisfaction is more important to him than money.

"I love car racing and ultimately you've got to look at what's best for you in the long term," Reed tells Auto Action.

"If I could do something that I could do for another 20 years then I think that is something that I would consider doing.

"Supercross is going to run out for me in the next five to eight years. I feel in can do it (V8 Supercars). I know I can get out there and be competitive. To what extent I don't know."

"Racers are not built or made. I really think that racers are born. You either got it or you don't, and I think I was given racing skills."

Reed says he's also thought about a trial for NASCAR's Busch Series, in which dual V8 Supercar champion Marcos Ambrose is racing this year, but he'd much prefer the Australian series.

"It (V8 Supercars) just seems a whole lot more fun than going round and round in circles," Reed says.

"If I were to make the change you gotta live it, breathe it, and eat it."

It almost sounds like a marketing campaign already!

Reed says his childhood heroes were Peter Brock, Mark Skaife and Craig Lowndes and that he regularly watches the V8 Supercars on Speed TV in the US.

And he feels that "with the right information and the right people around him" he too could do "real well" in car racing.

Reed is certainly one racer who could broaden V8 Supercar's appeal.

The talk has even stretched to the possibility that DJR could be going into administration and even shutting its doors.

However, Dick Johnson and his general manager, Steve Chalker, are putting a much brighter face on it than that.

Chalker has told this week's Auto Action that Johnson's First Rock and V8 Telecom companies that largely funded DJR's racing last year are now being sold off, and that will inject cash into the operation.

"We are still trying to dig ourselves out of the hole that was created by Westpoint (DJR's 2005 sponsor which collapsed that year) and, of course, funding it ourselves last year has left us pretty tight," Chalker says.

Johnson says the team is "in the midst of delicate negotiations" which he says he doesn't want to jeopardise by talking publicly about them.

A report several weeks ago that Britain's Carlin Motorsport had been offered a quarter share in the team with an option to buy the rest at the end of the year was vigorously denied at the time.

Speculation persists that DJR will be taken over. For a couple of weeks the talk centred on John Marshall of the No Limit Group, and father of racer Marcus Marshall, while now John Thompson, father of DJR development driver Andrew Thompson, and V8 development series team owner Mark Howard are being mentioned.

That aside, Chalker insists that with the Jim Beam sponsorship, the new alliance with Brut and the competitiveness of the team's cars this season in the hands of Steven Johnson and Will Davison "things are looking much brighter".

V8SA chief executive Wayne Cattach told teams and drivers at last weekend's Darwin round to drop the shackles they had felt for years, for fear of being charged with bringing the sport into disrepute, and to speak their minds freely and frequently.

There was a bit of slanging between drivers over some of the incidents on the track at Hidden Valley.

And the drivers have apparently been told to cherish that they are now in the only sport that allows its participants to criticise the umpire.

But now we read, in Auto Action, that at the "forum" between V8SA chairman Tony Cochrane and team owners at the weekend there was an edict that the team owners not discuss what was said in that meeting once they got outside.

So are we to interpret the edict to mean that V8SA is happy for the airing of any and all dirty linen provided it is not its own?

In any case, one team owner, Craig Gore, a Cochrane ally, promptly told AA's Mark Fogarty that, while there was unanimous support for Cochrane in the meeting, there was also consensus on finding "a suitable chairman" for the board of the proposed amalgamation of the Touring Car Entrants Group of Australia (TEGA) and V8SA.

"We all agree that that change must take place, and I think the boys at SEL (Sports Entertainment Limited, in which Cochrane and James Erskine are principals) accept that," Gore says.

SEL owns 25 per cent of V8SA, with the other 75 per cent in the hands of TEGA -- which wants its new chief, former federal Liberal political leader John Hewson, installed as chairman of the merged entity.

Any changeover at the top is now looking unlikely until the end of the year, when Cochrane's existing V8SA term expires.

In the meantime, Cochrane has undertaken -- according to Fogarty -- to adopt a more conciliatory approach.

It was his recent outburst against the 10 television network, saying that the V8 Supercars would not be shown on it when they return to the Australian Grand Prix next year (because he claimed 10 was blocking some live 7 networks telecasts into South Australia), that heightened opposition to Cochrane, which apparently resulted in a TEGA board sanction of him.

Not one to back down completely, Cochrane told Fogarty that while he's "prepared to learn" and will "change a bit", he's "not going to change radically".

It was the front-page story yesterday on Melbourne's Herald Sun, the country's biggest-selling daily newspaper.

NSW officials were reported to have already met F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone.

Certainly NSW is in the process of establishing an entity to attract major events, as most other states -- and most notably Victoria -- already have.

But, by breakfast time today, the GP story had become ‘NSW pulls into pits on F1 theft'  - i.e., Sydney doesn't want the GP - on page 13 of the Herald Sun.

Rather than any genuine competition between states to host the GP, it's hard not to conclude that someone is trying to create a false sense of auction.

The upshot of any such "auction" would simply be Ecclestone maximising the fees he can extract from wherever the race is held.

It will mark the international competition debut of the R56 generation MINI Challenge race cars to be built in Germany later this year.

The Confederation of Australian Motor Sport says the MINI Challenge has already been "an incredibly successful initiative" in some European countries and New Zealand.

"MINI's long-term commitment to Australian motor sport with this series will provide confidence to competitors and event promoters alike," says Graeme Emerton, chairman of CAMS' Australian Motor Racing Commission.

"The MINI brand has had a long association with motor sport in Australia, particularly in touring car racing, with their most significant achievement coming in 1966 with Rauno Aaltonen and Bob Holden at the helm of the victorious Morris Cooper S at Bathurst - a race in which Mini cars amazingly filled the top nine places."

Recent MINI motor sport activities in Australia have centred on tarmac rallying, with a three-car team (including one for our publishing director Mike Sinclair) the past two years.

One of the MINIs, driven by Paul Stokell, finished ninth outright in this year's Targa Tasmania (more here).

MINI's national manager Justin Hocevar says the MINI Challenge will be the most exciting new international series in Australian motor sport for years.

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