MOTORSPORT: Oh what a year 2007 was

On the track a year from the top shelf
Now that it's over, perhaps motorsport in 2007 wasn't as different as it seemed along the way.

Maybe it's just that the big things of the year were so much more exaggerated, particularly the brilliance of an F1 rookie -- and a black one at that -- and the espionage scandal, or what became known as Spygate or Stepneygate.

In the end, we hardly missed -- or even noticed the absence of -- Michael Schumacher.

Some things were pretty much the same, especially on the home front. Holden won most of the V8 Supercar races and produced the season champion, although Ford won the race that matters most -- Bathurst. Aaahhhhh, Bathurst. Now that's a motor race.

Europe has its Monaco Grand Prix, its Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium and its DTM (German Touring Car Championship), the Poms have their British GP and rave about their touring car series too, the Yanks have Daytona and Charlotte and a marathon NASCAR season, as well as the Indianapolis 500 at the Brickyard, but nothing matches our Bathurst.

One of the social buzz terms of the minute is people keeping, or being kept, "grounded" -- as in having some kind of emotional rock that helps maintain stability or equilibrium.

Well in motorsport, particularly for the Australian motorsport fan, it is Bathurst that keeps us grounded.

Bathurst was around long before much of the marketing hype and other bulldust of today and, despite the major upgrade of some of its facilities in recent times, remains what it has always been: an iconic Aussie motor race on public roads up, across and down a mountain, with Aussie cars and primarily Aussie drivers.

It's not just the Great Race, but the Greatest Race. If the Melbourne Cup is the horse race that stops the nation, Bathurst is the motor race that captures the Australian public's imagination for one day a year.

And what a beauty it was in 2007, with Jamie Whincup and Craig Lowndes successful for the second straight year in a Ford Falcon.

As brilliantly as Lowndes drove at Bathurst, when we mention this pairing we can now legitimately put Whincup's name first, or at least have them on an equal pedestal. At 24, Whincup not only has two Bathurst 1000 victories on his CV but came within just a couple of points of beating Garth Tander to the V8 Supercar Championship -- both of them ahead of Lowndes.

Now that was largely because of a distortion in the points-scoring system with which we disagree -- counting the endurance races in which drivers share cars towards the championship -- but Whincup is an amazingly accomplished sedan racing driver for one so young.

Tander won the championship the way it ought to be done -- by winning by far the most races. Now that he's 30, this title was even a little overdue, because it has been clear for a while now that Tander is the fastest driver of a V8 Supercar. The crown didn't come without a few late heart flutters, and perhaps there will always be those with Tander's combative style.

Season 2007 also saw a couple of big happenings behind the scenes about which we still don't know everything, and perhaps never might: the HSV team ownership saga, and an attempt to oust Tony Cochrane from the commercial driver's seat of V8 Supercars Australia.

The bottom line is that HSV kept racing, contrary to some indications at the start of the championship and with Tom Walkinshaw and Mark Skaife as 50-50 owners, while Cochrane rather effortlessly, it seems, headed off a push to install former federal political heavyweight John Hewson as the tribal leader of V8 Supercars.

What went unnoticed in '07 was how our Aussie V8 championship is now totally dominated by British team owners -- Walkinshaw Performance with the four top Holdens, and Roland Dane's Triple 8 Engineering with the Bathurst and Sandown enduro-winning and championship-contending Fords and David Richards' Prodrive-run Ford Performance Racing.

An Aussie-owned V8 Supercar only won one V8 Supercar Championship heat this year, and that was a Garry Rogers Commodore driven by Lee Holdsworth in freakish wet conditions at Oran Park. That was a feather in Holdsworth's cap, and proof that at least the country is still turning up plenty of young driver talent.

On the Ford side of the fence, the rising star is Mark Winterbottom -- who might by now have a Bathurst win to his name with a little bit of luck.

Much more could be said or written about the V8 season, but for us one thing that stood out was the re-emergence of the iconic Dick Johnson Racing after a year of heartache that it might go under.

Oh, and one other thing. The return of the V8s to the 7 network has not been the disaster some doomsayers predicted. Indeed, it's been quite a success, although we are intrigued that nothing has been mentioned of the ratings for the grand finale at Phillip Island -- which we would have expected to have been damn good, as there was little other sport that weekend to compete with the championship decider. Perhaps in this case no news is not good news.

While V8 Supercars are our Aussie cup of tea, on the global stage there is nothing quite like Formula 1.

Year after year there are gripes that there is not enough overtaking, but for the first time since Adelaide in 1986 the world title had three title contenders at the final round.
And, even more so than usual, off-track events kept F1 in the forefront of many minds.

How extraordinary that one of the great GP teams, McLaren, should be fined US$100 million and stripped of all its constructors' championship points -- handing that title on a plate to its great rival Ferrari.

Then, to really rub it in, Ferrari snatched the drivers' title with Kimi Raikkonen at the final round as wonderboy rookie Lewis Hamilton's fairytale season turned sour in Brazil, on top of all the bitterness he'd gone through with dual world champion teammate Fernando Alonso, who could not accept Hamilton being given equal status within McLaren, and even feeling the glamour youngster was being given favorable treatment.

Leaving the more established (at Ferrari) Felipe Massa in his wake, Raikkonen came from the clouds to amass 36 points of a possible 40 in the last four races to claim a crown he perhaps already should have won twice with McLaren.

His six wins for the season was ultimately 50 per cent more than either Hamilton or Alonso.

What is going to be interesting now is to see whether Hamilton is indeed what he has appeared to be in his meteoric debut season -- a driver in the truly great class, capable of winning championships in the manner of and as often as Schumacher, with the team revolving around him.

Certainly a young driver who wins four GPs in his first season, is on the podium at almost every race and comes within a point of being the youngest world champion must be very, very special.

But, as much as the world has marvelled at his startling arrival in the F1 fishbowl, we just wonder whether he might go the way of so many other British sportsman and prove to be more a bridesmaid than a groom.

Perhaps that is just our old-fashioned Aussie antipathy towards the Poms. Of course, Hamilton's origins are only partly British -- on his mother's side. His roots are really in the Caribbean, although we got sick of hearing and seeing him described as the first black F1 driver.

How quickly the world forgot the color of Indian Narain Karthikeyan's skin when he raced in F1 in 2005 -- or even that he did race.

Hamilton's success almost totally overshadowed the performance of several other young drivers, notably Nico Rosberg at Williams, Sebastien Vettel with BMW Sauber and later Scuderio Toro Rosso (despite costing Aussie Mark Webber a podium and perhaps victory at the Japanese GP), Robert Kubica with BMW and to a lesser extent Adrian Sutil at Spyker (now becoming Force India) and Heikki Kovalainen with Renault -- and who trades places with Alonso for 2008.

Also largely lost to all but the most observant was the form of Webber. On the surface it looked like another year wasted, ruined by mechanical unreliability, but Webber has now spent six years in F1 and driven more than 100 GPs with just a couple of podiums to show for it -- and there's a good reason why he's kept his spot.

Despite what the mainstream media or general public might say or think about Webber's career, he's a damn fine F1 driver. Not, in our opinion, in the league of Alonso, Raikkonen or Hamilton, or perhaps Heidfeld and maybe even Button.

He may lack some of the racecraft of the truly great F1 drivers, but for sheer pace -- especially in qualifying -- Webber is right up there. For his knockers, we found some sobering comment in the pre-Christmas edition of Britain's Autosport magazine.

"The Aussie was outscored by Red Bull teammate David Coulthard, but the points totals don't tell the full story. Here are some other stats: six times he beat DC by at least six places and four time he was top-six on the grid.

"Had it not been for that moment in Japan (where he was running behind Hamilton but got clobbered by Vettel), he might have taken his first win."

At the end of a driver's career his race results will be the measure of his success, but to us qualifying is a great barometer of a driver's talent -- and on that score Webber beat Coulthard, a most accomplished and experienced driver and winner of more than a dozen GPs, 15 times at 17 rounds.

Red Bull team boss Christian Horner has lamented the Japanese GP as "the one that got away" -- a possible first win for the team and Webber -- and called it both the high and low marks of the season.

The history books will reflect little of what might have been, but -- despite the many doubting Thomases -- we have faith that Webber might yet jag a win in F1. It will most likely require wet weather and/or a race of attrition, but if ever all the planets align he could yet do it.

Bigger even than all that happened on the GP tracks this year was the spying scandal. And, now that there has been closure on that case, we can't help thinking that it has reinforced what we've long thought: that F1 revolves around Ferrari, almost for its benefit, and that the rules are different, or applied quite differently, to those who -- like Ferrari and Renault's Flavio Briatore - are friendly with those who are most powerful in the running of the sport than those who are not, like McLaren's Ron Dennis.

We won't even attempt to encapsulate here the espionage tale(s) -- involving the passing of Ferrari secrets by disaffected Nigel Stepney to McLaren's Mike Coughlan, and a former McLaren engineer taking files to Renault -- but after all the hundreds of pages we have read on the matter over many months we are left with a couple of simple impressions.

One is that we still fail to see what McLaren is supposed to have gained from the Ferrari dossier, so why was it clobbered so hard? And what the whole saga brought to light was that Ferrari won the season-opening Australian GP with an illegal car, because it had a flexible floor in it.

Now wasn't that the only serious incidence of mechanical illegality in the whole business? Yet that car and Ferrari got off scot-free, while McLaren got taken to the cleaners. And later on Renault got off without even a wrap over the knuckles. Does there seem to be some great inconsistency in all of this?

Just what is it about Ron Dennis, or that he has done over the years, that so upsets Federation de l'Automobile (FIA) president Max Mosley, and to only a slightly lesser extent F1 commercial supreme Bernie Ecclestone? That we might never know, but Dennis must be given credit for the way in which he has absorbed the many lashes inflicted on him in '07.

For '08 F1 will still have only 11 teams, after Prodrive's plans to field McLaren-Mercedes "customer" cars were scuppered.

We understand the objections of the likes of Sir Frank Williams that F1 teams should be essentially constructors, but how on earth did the F1 heavies agree to give Prodrive a franchise, knowing fully its intention to run customer cars?

Those running motor racing at the highest levels are lucky they do not come under the same scrutiny as their counterparts in some other sports, because if they were they would be exposed for some of the farcical things that have taken place over the years -- and particularly in recent times.

As we move on from F1, mention must be made of what a mess the Japanese teams, Toyota and Honda, have made of their programs. They have simply been disgraceful.

Honda, which apart from its poor results fielded cars in '07 that looked like compost heaps, has at least done something about its predicament by hiring Ross Brawn, who was the key technical man in all seven of Michael Schumacher's world titles.

Toyota has at least ditched overpaid, under-performing and inconsistent Ralf Schumacher, but beyond that there is no sign of real progress. And, if Toyota's F1 efforts over six years have been woeful, its debut season in NASCAR was no better. It got off on the wrong foot, sprung for trying to cheat at the opening race, and its Camrys were never competitive, often failing even to make the field.

NASCAR, it must be said, is one of the great racing series on earth. Perhaps the best of all. As much as we enjoyed F1 this year, we saw some mention that there had only been four lead changes as a result of overtaking (rather than pitstops) for the whole year. Yet in NASCAR you can have that many lead changes in as many laps, if not almost in one lap on some of the bigger ovals.

And, if motor racing is about the pursuit of excellence, then NASCAR has that in abundance. The sport's top team, Hendrick Motorsports, does things the way they ought to be done. It has won seven titles in NASCAR's premier league.

Jeff Gordon has won four of them and has been the sport's benchmark driver since the death of Dale Earnhardt. Yet the past two titles have been won by Gordon's teammate Jimmie Johnson, who towards the end of this season won four races in a row -- something not seen in American stock car racing for years. Johnson wound up with 10 wins for the season. Hendrick Motorsports won half the races in the series and dominated those that featured the new Car of Tomorrow NASCARs.

Just so that no complacency sets in, Rick Hendrick has recruited the sport's most popular driver, and a Daytona 500 winner himself, Dale Earnhardt Junior, into the squad for 2008.

As a perspective, Juan Pablo Montoya was a pretty good F1 driver who defected to NASCAR in mid-2006 and in his first full season of stock car racing with Chip Ganassi Racing, another of America's top teams, Montoya finished 20th in the Nextel Cup and was perceived to have done pretty well.

That is a reality check for the likes of Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti, fellow Indy Racing League ace Sam Hornish Junior, and Canada's 1997 F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve as they follow Montoya into American stock car racing. It is also instructive in how uphill the battle will be for Australia's dual V8 Supercar champion Marcos Ambrose to progress further in NASCAR.

Eighth overall and No. 2 rookie in the second-tier Busch series was a commendable effort for Ambrose in '07, but if Montoya was 20th in the Nextel Cup with Ganassi then we think Ambrose is going to have to find a better Ford outfit than Wood Brothers/JTG Racing to come anywhere near that in the next couple of years.

Of the other prominent Aussies in the US, Ryan Briscoe was startlingly quick driving a Porsche Spyder in the American Le Mans Series and fifth in the Indy 500 in a one-off drive, while Will Power had a fair degree of success -- race victories and pole positions -- in Champ Car, although less than he and his backers would have liked.

For '08 it's more of the same for Power, while Briscoe has cracked it for a full-time IRL drive with Penske Racing, the mighty team that has won the Indy 500 14 times.

Perhaps a big consolation prize awaits Briscoe while seeing contemporaries he whipped in Europe, like Robert Kubica and Timo Glock, race in F1.

Still on open-wheelers, Australia has yet to make any serious impression in the A1 GP series. Sydney's Ian Dyk has been the driver in the team headed by Australia's last F1 world champion, Alan Jones, most of '07 but we suspect a change is coming, in the form of Queenslander John Martin.

So now, last and sadly least, to rallying. The world rally championship, we always think, has some drivers at least the equal of the best in F1.

Frenchman Sebastien Loeb showed that yet again with his fourth title in a row in a Citroen, while Finn Marcus Gronholm has gone off into retirement with two world titles but having shown this year again why he has been Loeb's bridesmaid -- because he makes more mistakes when it matters most, even though his Ford Focus may have been a better rally car than Loeb's C4 Citroen.

The tragedy of the year was the death in a helicopter crash of Scottish former world champion Colin McRae -- and that there had no longer been a place for him in the WRC before that.

Australia's Chris Atkinson racked up 31 points to be seventh in a championship during which he fell out with his Aussie co-driver Glenn Macneall -- something else that hasn't been fully explained in '07.

"We moved forward in quite a lot of areas -- with my driving in different conditions and with my pace on tarmac," Atkinson said. "We won stages on every surface too, which was quite good, but obviously it wasn't the result the team was looking for and I guess we all know that."

For '08 Atkinson's hope is built on a new factory Subaru, but there is a reality.

"Obviously Sebastien Loeb is going to be the guy to beat and we are looking - Petter Soberg (Norwegian former world champion and Subaru teammate) and myself, both to be up there competing for wins and podiums.

"We want to get into a position where we can hopefully fight for a championship in the next year or two."

Of the Australian rally championship, the less said the better for now. Toyota won the title for the second year running, but it was the only manufacturer seriously competing, with Ford's half-hearted effort via Jason Bright's Britek.

Aside from the action in the forests, the bodies meant to be running the sport in Australia are in disarray, the ARC's sponsor has gone, and the transfer of Rally Australia -- the country's WRC round -- to the east coast, supposedly to south-east Queensland, has been massively bungled.

What's that saying about not being able to see the forest for the trees? Anyway, our energies today have been devoted to recalling what we've seen as the best and worst of 2007.

Predictions for 2008 are another story and call for a bit more bravado than we have in the tank at the minute after our reflections on '07.

Suffice to say for now that if '08 is anywhere near as enthralling as '07 none of us will have many grounds for complaint.