MOTORSPORT: Paddock palaver

Thursday motorsport reportDecember 6, 2007

The best examples these past few days have been the notions that Aussie V8 Supercars might race at Singapore's Formula 1 grand prix and that NASCAR icon Dale Earnhardt Junior might come and race in Oz for a year.

How and why do people get into saying, circulating or believing such nonsense?

We've just finished a wonderful year of racing. Apart from enthralling action of the circuits around the country, it seems the TV ratings for the V8 season finale at Phillip Island were very good.

We haven't had a chance yet to even see a ratings report, let alone read and digest it, but we're told Sunday's Channel 7 telecast from the Island peaked at almost 700,000.

That's a very healthy number and we hope to have the time over the next week or so to analyse the situation, but our gut feeling is that the numbers -- while good -- will be a bit below those for Adelaide's Clipsal 500 or the V8 races at the Gold Coast Indy.

It will also be interesting to see how they compare with Bathurst. Certainly they will be a long way short, but our interest will be in whether they are more or less than half the Bathurst audience.

As good as we are anticipating them to be, if they are below Adelaide and the Gold Coast there is reason to question why.

Certainly the other two events are now well entrenched on the V8 Supercar calendar, while the Phillip Island grand final is a much newer concept.

But shouldn't the most people be watching when the racing matters most -- when the championship is at its climax? And certainly when there was little other major sport on around Australia last weekend.

Anyway, enough of that rambling when we haven't even seen the raw numbers. Now this business about the V8 Supercars perhaps racing at the Singapore GP.

The South-East Asian island city-state will host its first F1 event on the last weekend of September next year -- the first night GP in F1 history -- and V8 Supercar honcho Tony Cochrane admits there is no way the Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons will be there then.

But he'd love them to be at the second Singapore event in 2009. Having F1 cars racing there at night and V8 Supercars in the afternoon would, according to Cochrane, be "bigger than Ben Hur".

We reckon there is more chance of a V8 Supercar driver going to the moon in 2008 or '09. Just consider a couple of things.

V8 Supercars are telecast on the 7 network in Australia. The first season of a six-year contract has just ended.

F1 is telecast in Australia on the 10 network. And, to the best of our knowledge, will be until the expiry of Melbourne's existing contract to stage the F1 GP in 2010.

The 10 contract is to screen each F1 GP from wherever around the world each year. No support races from any GP, other than Melbourne, are seen on Australian TV.

It is highly unlikely, the way Bernie Ecclestone runs F1, that any GP support races outside Australia ever would make it to Aussie TV screens.

So what chance V8 Supercars racing in Singapore would be screened into Australia? And, if they weren't going to be on TV in their homeland, why go there?

There is no indication, that we know of, that the Singapore GP organisers want the V8 Supercars there. And one thing that is virtually certain is that Ecclestone won't.

He's never really wanted them running at the Australian GP but has tolerated them at the urging of the local GP organisers that they are necessary to help attract a crowd to our round of the F1 world championship (and hopefully in March 2008 they will help reinvigorate an Oz GP that has endured myriad problems in recent times, not least the absence of the V8 Supercars this year).

If Ecclestone isn't keen on having them in Australia, who on earth is going to be agreeable to having them in Singapore?

His attitude will be that he has spent a lot of time agreeing the Singapore deal and what he wants that event to be is an F1 event for the world, and to enhance F1's position in Asia.

So why, in his eyes, dilute that, by allowing V8 Supercars in there? As much as we Australians might love watching them, what is it exactly that these cars would do for Singapore?

Like F1 or not, at least its front-line drivers are well known globally and therefore of great appeal to a new GP venue.

But the Mark Skaifes and Craig Lowndes' are not exactly household names in Singapore, or anywhere else in Asia or further abroad, and we can't find any massive headlines of Garth Tander's title success in the Singapore press this week.

If the V8 Supercars did ever get to Singapore it would most likely have to be a non-championship round, because Ecclestone doesn't want support races being rounds of championships unless they are in some other way connected with his show -- as Formula 3000 was and GP2 now is.

As for the televising of V8 Supercars, just back into Australia, from Singapore, would the 10 network be interested in screening them?

Perhaps, because they probably miss not having them regularly now (although, contrary to Cochrane's mid-year outburst, they will get a dose of them at Melbourne's Albert Park next March).

Perhaps not, though, if personalities rather than reason were to be a major factor. 10 resents losing the V8 Supercars to 7 this year, and the infamous Cochrane outburst that, in return for 10 not playing ball on AFL telecasting in South Australia this year he didn't want the V8s going out of Albert Park on 10.

Such factors aside, and in the very slight chance that the V8s were ever on the Singapore event schedule, Ecclestone would want a fee, an extra fee, for the telecasting of them.

In fact, there would most likely be two fees -- the first for the filming, which he would insist be done by his TV operation, and the second a rights fee for showing the pictures.

And when Ecclestone talks fees he talks in absolutely inverse proportion to his own diminutive size.

So even if 10 wanted to show V8 races from Singapore, would it be prepared to pay the costs? We very much doubt it.

And, in the even more unlikely case that the F1 race could be shown on 10 and the V8s on 7, would 7 want to pay the costs/fees? Again, we very much doubt it.

While 7 already has the rights to the V8 Supercar Championship for another five years, why would it want to know the expense of, perhaps, showing another race or two or three from overseas, that didn't count towards the championship, and for which Ecclestone would be demanding a massive fee.

So, in the unlikely event that the V8s get to Singapore and neither 10 nor 7 can strike an arrangement to screen them, would V8 Supercars Australia be prepared to put its hand in its pocket to pay the Ecclestone fees to get them to air.

Now that would be a test for Tony Cochrane.

It's something that won't ever get to be tested in that way, because we don't reckon the notion will get much further than a bit of kite-flying in the wake of an adrenalin-charged 2007 Phillip Island finale.

Oh, and this matter of Dale Earnhardt Junior. He's one of the top drivers in NASCAR, which by many measures could be said to be the most successful racing series in the world.

Earnhardt didn't win a race this year in NASCAR's premier division, the Nextel Cup (in future to be called the Sprint Cup).

Yet he reputedly may still have made as much as US$50 million -- the first US$5 million in prizemoney, the rest of it in endorsements.

Although he is an accomplished driver, Earnhardt's main asset is his name.

He lives, and it's not his fault, on the popularity of his late father, also Dale Earnhardt, who won the NASCAR title seven times but was killed on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona.

As great as we like to think our Aussie V8 Supercar scene is, and Earnhardt came and had a look at it first-hand at Phillip Island (and professes to watch the other races on TV), it is a dwarf in comparison with NASCAR.

And that is why talk of Earnhardt perhaps coming to Australia for a year to race in V8 Supercars is nonsense.

It's understandable that he was interested in them at Phillip Island, even more understandable that he was complimentary, even flattering, about them, and that he enjoys watching them on TV.

But let's get real. What man, driving in what is, in many respects, the biggest race series in the world, certainly the biggest in his country, which happens to be generally regarded as the most important in the world, is going to walk away from that, and around US$50 million a year, for a V8 Supercar drive?

Were such a driver available to a V8 Supercar team, what could one of our teams afford to pay him?

At best a couple of million. And he surely would be worth a couple of million for promotional activities. But he would still be a long way short of US$50 million.

Earnhardt, and other top American or international drivers, might genuinely love the chance of a one-race driver in a V8 Supercar, and the obvious one would be Bathurst, but a NASCAR driver is committed to racing every weekend from late February through to November, so even that is only a remote chance.

So now, dear reader, you might understand why we think those in the motor sport community who entertain notions of Dale Earnhardt Junior racing out here, and V8 Supercars racing on the streets of Singapore, are hallucinating.

Just before we get away from V8 Supercars, we pointed out here earlier this week that 36 of the 37 races this year were won by cars built and prepared by outfits headed by British entrepreneurs -- Tom Walkinshaw, Roland Dane and David Richards.

Lamenting that our homegrown great-name teams like Dick Johnson Racing and Perkins Engineering were no longer race winners, we pointed out that the only other race victory was by Lee Holdsworth in the Garry Rogers Motorsport (GRM) Commodore in the freakish wet conditions of Oran Park's third race.

Now we note that it has been confirmed that GRM will get its engines in 2008 from none other than Walkinshaw Performance.

So get set for the completion of the British takeover of what is still supposedly Australian touring car racing, called V8 Supercars, next year.

Something has gone astray in all this.

Many of Australia's proudest sporting moments have been in beating the Poms at cricket. Indeed, we delight in beating them at anything, and usually do -- although our rugby blokes have left us with egg on our face too often in recent times.

Yet somehow our Australian touring car industry has surrendered to invaders from the old country.

Oh, yes, and one other thing on the V8 scene.

Confirmation has come that Todd Kelly is moving from the Holden Racing Team to the Perkins/Jack Daniel's outfit for 2008.

And that clears the way for champion Garth Tander to move from Toll-HSV across to HRT, alongside Mark Skaife. Expect confirmation of that to come by Friday afternoon.

Holden headquarters has had a big hand in this, we suspect. Why would Todd Kelly, winner of the most recent race in the category with one of the premier teams, be moving to another that -- pre Jack Daniel's -- had its share of success, at least at Bathurst (which matters most, and even more so when it had that success) but is now at the other end of the table?

Kelly could hardly be doing it entirely of his own choice. He passed up the chance to swap with Tander, which would have meant him partnering 2006 champion brother Rick in the HSV team owned by his parents.

Now maybe he didn't want to be straining family relations, but -- much as we admire Larry Perkins -- why on earth would Todd Kelly be going to the Perkins/Jack Daniel's team right now.

If that is a puzzle, so too, still is the future of dual F1 world champion Fernando Alonso, although it may become clearer tonight after Renault faces the FIA's world motor sport council in the latest round of the F1 espionage saga.

If Renault goes for a row, as McLaren did a couple of months ago, Alonso may not want a bar of going back to the team with which he won world titles in 2005 and '06.

We suspect Renault will get off lighter than McLaren, which copped a US$100 million fine and was stripped of all its constructors' world championship points for the season -- costing in the constructors' title.

Ahead of tonight's hearing, McLaren -- or more officially Vodafone McLaren Mercedes -- has taken even more stick from FIA president Max Mosley, and been forced to issue the following press release with a very red face:

"The FIA has asked us to correct certain factual errors contained in a press briefing given on our behalf by one journalist concerning Renault F1 and we are pleased to do so. The corrections are as follows.

"In our briefing, we stated that there were 18 witness statements from Renault employees admitting that they had viewed McLaren confidential information.

"To the extent that this implied that 18 different Renault employees admitted viewing McLaren confidential information, it was inaccurate. 13 Renault F1 employees provided 18 witness statements and 9 of them have so far admitted they viewed and discussed the confidential technical information belonging to McLaren.

"We stated that the confidential information on computer disks was uploaded on to 11 Renault computers. This is not accurate. Mr (Phil) Mackereth copied information on to 11 computer disks.

"The information on these 11 computer disks was uploaded by Renault IT staff in September 2006 onto Renault's T-drive and then transferred by Mr Mackereth to his personal home directory stored on Renault's network server. A back-up copy of the material on Mr Mackereth's personal directory was made on to an unknown number of Renault's back-up servers/tapes.

"Our briefing could have been interpreted as suggesting that the Renault employees who admitted sight of McLaren confidential information all viewed it on computer screens.

"Only Mr Mackereth and Mr Hardie admit viewing McLaren confidential information on Mr Mackereth's computer. The other seven employees who have admitted seeing McLaren confidential information admit seeing it in the form of computer print-outs or hard copy documents. We said that the information on the 11 computer disks taken by

Mr Mackereth included 780 individual drawings.

"This was an error. The information taken by Mr Mackereth on floppy disks, in hard copy form and by email amounts to 762 pages when printed out. The 11 computer disks included 18 individual technical drawings. Mr Mackereth also admits that he took hard copy drawings of McLaren's dampers.

"We said that the McLaren information amounted to the 'entire technical blueprint of the 2006 and 2007 McLaren car'.

"This requires clarification. The position is that, the McLaren drawings plus the information in a confidential MP4-22A specification document taken by Mr Mackereth constitute a technical definition of the fundamental layout of the 2007 McLaren car and the technical details of its innovative and performance enhancing systems.

"We are pleased to assist the FIA in making the above clear in advance of tomorrow's (Thursday's) hearing."

On that note, here endeth today's commentary on some of the farcical things going on in motor sport at the minute.