MOTORSPORT: Now for something completely different

V8 Supercars to roar in the Top End while on the world stage a lot of interest will be in a car that can't win – the DeltaWing competing in the Le Mans 24-Hour.

MOTORSPORT
Friday June 15

DeltaWing excitement - Even if it’s all being done by halves
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If the last weekend of May was the high point of the motor racing year so far – with the Monaco Grand Prix, the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 – this weekend may come close to matching it. The V8 Supercar Championship resumes in Darwin after a month off, the world’s biggest sportscar race – the Le Mans 24-Hour - is on in France, while in America the IndyCars are at the Milwaukee Mile and NASCAR at a resurfaced Michigan superspeedway.

It also is a mega time on the sport’s political front, with the World Rally Championship crisis and Formula One costs on the agenda for tonight’s World Motor Sport Council meeting.

Whether next year’s WRC calendar is announced after the meeting or not confirmed for a couple more weeks, another Rally Australia is expected to be run on NSW’s Coffs Coast next year.

Potentially most interesting among all the racing this weekend could be the debut at Le Mans of the radical DeltaWing car from America. It won’t win – there isn’t even a category for it, but rather it is competing under a special “Garage 56” invitation - and it may not even finish.

At best it might match some of the LMP2 (Le Mans Prototype class two) cars, although its drivers will be trying to stay out of the way of any cars quicker than it.

With half the weight , half the power (from a turbocharged 1.6-litre Nissan engine) and half the aerodynamic drag of a more conventional racing car, and 10cm wide front tyres and a front wheel track width of only 60cm, it is something very different.

Originally intended for IndyCar racing but rejected by that series, might the DeltaWing become the equivalent of Australian Ben Lexen’s winged keel in America’s Cup yachting? Perhaps not.

In a year, or two or three, it may be no more than a trivial memory, but for the minute it is the most interesting concept since the late Derek Gardner’s six-wheel Tyrrell F1 car of the 1970s.

Le Mans is different to the sport’s other classic events because it is a race for cars rather than a race more about drivers than the machinery. However, Australian eyes and ears will be on the two Aussies in the field – David Brabham making his 18th start (having won outright with Peugeot in 2009 and had a couple of earlier class victories for Aston Martin) and John Martin.

Brabham is in a Honda Performance Development ARX-03a run by Britain’s JRM Racing this time, while 26-year-old Queenslander Martin is in an Alan Docking Racing ORECA-Nissan. The pair will start 11th and 14th respectively.

Audi is a red-hot favourite for another win in this 80th running of the 24-hour classic with its double-pronged attack of two turbodiesel cars and two diesel-hybrids.

Its main opponent this year, after Peugeot’s withdrawal, is Toyota with two unraced petrol hybrids.

Top End may toss up different V8 Supercar winner(s)
Form would suggest that Ford ought to be as hot a favourite in the V8 Supercar round in Darwin as the Audis at Le Mans. Ford Performance Racing has won the past seven races in the series and nine of 11 this championship season.

Darwin has not been such a happy hunting ground for the dominant driver of recent years, Jamie Whincup. He has only won two races at Darwin’s Hidden Valley and has never had a pole position at the circuit.

Holden Racing Team has had 14 race wins in the 14 previous years the V8s have visited the Northern Territory capital, yet it is winless this season – indeed since last year’s Bathurst 1000.

Garth Tander has had three podiums for HRT this season and James Courtney none, although the 2010 series champion is publicly adamant he will see out his three-year contract with the team next year.

FPR’s Will Davison has better than a 50 per cent win rate this year, with six victories from the 11 races, and has only missed the podium twice. Yet Whincup, with eight podiums and only two wins, is just 10 points behind Davison – 1206 to 1216, while Davison’s teammate Mark Winterbottom is only another 19 points away on 1187, including three wins and seven podiums.

While those three have been the only race victors this year, Hidden Valley has produced its share of surprises.

Five different teams have won the last five races in the Top End, starting with Michael Caruso for Garry Rogers Motorsport in 2009 and including the Kelly Brothers-Jack Daniel’s and Stone Brothers outfits as well as FPR and Team Vodafone since. Last year Rick Kelly and Shane van Gisbergen both won from 12th on the grid.

So while the form book points to FPR and Team Vodafone’s Whincup or Craig Lowndes, history suggests a turn-up.

New sports car series for Asia
The Le Mans organiser, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO), has announced a new six-round Asian Le Mans Series for next year.

Only five venues have been announced, and it seems that the intention is for it to be Asian rather than an Asia-Pacific series.

“We have to organise Le Mans type endurance races in expanding markets, as this will enable manufacturers to showcase the reliability of their cars, enhance their image and demonstrate the soundness of their new technologies. This is obviously the case today in China and also in the whole of Asia,” ACO president Pierre Fillon said.

The organisation’s director of international development Remy Brouard said it had “always concentrated on long-term development, which is a telling argument in the Asian continent”.

“The ACO's aim is not to visit this continent once or twice a year, but to build a solid base for the long term.”

Races in the initial series will be three hours but it is planned to stretch them to four hours in 2014.

A round of this series may be the kind of event the management at the revamped Sydney Motorsport Park (previously known as Eastern Creek) would like to attract.

Alas international prototype sportscar racing has a sorry history in Australia. Melbourne’s Sandown attracted an event in the late 1980s and the streets of Adelaide hosted the Race of a Thousand Years (the final round of the 2000 American Le Mans Series season) at the turn of the century.

Penalty for Power. Dodge for Ambrose?
Wherever Australia’s IndyCar series leader Will Power qualifies at Milwaukee he will have to start 10 places lower on the grid. The penalty on Power’s Team Penske car is for a change of Chevrolet engine needed after midweek testing in Iowa.

New Zealander Scott Dixon, second in the series, also needed a change of his Honda engine and he will incur the same grid penalty, as will four other drivers – including last weekend’s victor in Texas, Englishman Justin Wilson.

The IndyCar round scheduled for Qingdao in China on August 19 was cancelled this week by the Chinese promoter and the series organisers are trying to arrange a replacement race to maintain the 16-race calendar.

Meanwhile, there has been speculation in NASCAR circles this week that Australian Marcos Ambrose’s team, Richard Petty Motorsports, will announce a return to racing Dodge cars next year.

Richard 'The King' Petty had most of his success, which included seven Cup titles and 200 race victories, with Dodges. As a team owner, however, he switched to running Fords in 2010.

Even though Roger Penske’s IndyCar team has led Chevrolet’s return to that open-wheeler series this year, his Sprint Cup team is to campaign Fords next year, leaving Dodge without a team – a gap the Petty outfit, now on a much more stable footing, is seen as best suited to fill.

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MOTORSPORT: Now for something completely different

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