MOTORSPORT: Par excellence, no bull ... Err, all bull

This article is not meant to be an advertisement for the energy drink company that supports the top teams in F1 and V8 Supercars, simply an acknowledgement that when it goes motor racing, it finds the right people and teams.

Vettel’s victory at Interlagos in Sao Paulo was his 13th of the year, equaling a record of his retired German compatriot, Michael Schumacher.

Webber departed motor racing’s highest league the best he could, sharing the podium with drivers he acknowledged as “the best of this generation” -- Vettel and Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso.

The race was no classic. It might have been had the rain that threatened eventuated, yet in another way F1 was on show at its best. There was the classy driving but also the way Vettel declined to be interviewed first on the podium, insisting the Brazilian TV personality with the microphone speak first to Webber on the day of his retirement from F1.

While they will never be best friends, Vettel and Webber have been most respectful and sporting towards each other through this recent patch.

There was so much more too at Interlagos – the Aussie-themed tributes to Webber before the race (our flag hung over his car, the playing of Waltzing Matilda and the ‘Thank You Mark’ message on his pit board) and him removing his helmet on the cool-down lap as he reciprocated the applause of the spectators.

Webber admitted over the weekend that “maybe I did not have the absolute natural flair and talent” of the most elite drivers but “I smashed a lot of guys who had more talent than me because they didn’t work as hard as me”.

That was a more appropriate perspective than having recently compared himself to F1’s one-time world champions (which include Australia’s Alan Jones).

To this author, Webber ranks in the league of David Coulthard and Rubens Barrichello – excellent drivers, multiple GP winners but short of Schumacher, Mika Hakkinen, Vettel and Alonso in the past two decades.

Jenson Button is somewhere between those two groups – a one-time world champion but not in the bracket of those four multiple world champions.

Anyway, enough of F1 for the minute.

Superior as a spectacle in the past 72 hours was the weekend’s V8 Supercar racing at Victoria’s Phillip Island. Indeed, it’s hard to remember better action in Australia’s premier race series, although the Gold Coast 600 four weeks earlier and the last hour of the Bathurst 1000 were up there too… Certainly for spectators at the tracks and TV viewers, if not team owners at the Gold Coast having to wear the repair bills.

But Phillip Island so easily could have turned ugly, even fatal, had things been just a little different in the James Courtney-Alex Premat collision and the runaway wheel from Lee Holdsworth’s Mercedes. Thankfully not, but these incidents were stark reminders that there can never be complacency at racetracks about safety.

Perhaps the secret ingredient to the Phillip Island was the return to the sprint rather than endurance format – it gave the racing a new urgency, at a fabulous track with the (weather) elements playing their part.

Saturday threw up a refreshingly different podium – the Holdens of Garth Tander and Fabian Coulthard and the Ford of Alex Davison.

More normal service was resumed on the results sheets on Sunday, with three Holden drivers on the podium the first time (Lowndes, Whincup and Shane Van Gisbergen) and the three top drivers in the championship the second time (Whincup, Ford’s Mark Winterbottom and Lowndes).

The title is an arm wrestle now between the Triple Eight/Red Bull pair, with Whincup having regained the points lead from Lowndes on Saturday and stretched it a little to 20 points on Sunday.

While Lowndes is chasing his fourth title (and first since 1999), Whincup is after his third straight and a fifth overall (in just six years). That achievement would put him in a “club” with Mark Skaife, Dick Johnson and the late Ian Geoghegan.

Winterbottom is now 124 points off the lead compared with 88 before Phillip Island – a disappointment for the Blue Oval camp after he qualified with two pole positions and a third.

He’s still an outside chance for the title at the Sydney finale on December 7-8 and teammate Will Davison a remote chance too at 223 points behind Whincup with 300 to be earned at the Homebush Olympic street circuit.

Ford Performance Racing cracked it for a victory at Bathurst in the “crown jewel” event of the year, but over the course of the season, and particularly in sprint racing, it is still not quite at the level of Triple Eight.

For next year FPR -- now privately-owned but with Ford factory support for at least another year -- will bring its precocious young talent Chaz Mostert back in-house from Dick Johnson Racing.

Looking even further ahead, FPR has taken on the latest Shannons Supercar Showdown winner, 18-year-old South Australian Todd Hazelwood, as a test driver. Haxelwood’s already had one test outing with the team as a prize for winning the Showdown.

And just on young emerging talents, another teenager, Victorian Anton De Pasquale, has won what may have been the final Australian Formula Ford Championship (although a national series is still envisaged in some form next year).

While Formula Ford’s viability on the national stage has been in question of late, V8 Supercar team owners are reported (by NewsCorp) to be “hatching a secret plan” to buy back the category from 65 per cent owner Archer Capital.

Newspaper journalist James Phelps has written that, “dissatisfied with Archer Capital’s involvement”, the teams want to raise the cash to “reclaim” the sport.

It’s an interesting twist and might bring a new focus to the health of V8 Supercar racing.

James Warburton, the ex-television boss installed as chief executive this year, has repeatedly said the “product” in this first season of the ‘Car of the Future’ is excellent and that it will get better with formatting refinements, including twilight racing. Phillip Island was evidence that the “product” is excellent – as has much of the season been.

The worry is that neither day of the Phillip Island round registered among the top 20 programs on TV, meaning Seven’s telecasts had less than an average in the five major capital cities on Saturday of 325,000 viewers and fewer than 484,000 on Sunday.

The Test cricket in Brisbane was up near the top of the charts both days, of course, with averages of more than a million viewers in the five capitals.

The mathematics will be crucial if V8 Supercar teams try to “take out” Archer Capital. The private equity firm will want a return on its investment to depart.

The teams would be seeking to get access to the cashflows from TV rights, race sanction fees and government subsidies.

The first question is whether the teams can raise the money for a buyout. Secondly, if they borrow to do so, whether they (as a collective) can afford to service loans if and when interest rates rise from their historically low levels now.

At the heart of all that is Warburton engineering a better TV deal beyond next year than the package he inherited from predecessor David Malone.

Back to F1 to conclude today…

Mark Webber’s second place in Brazil today gave him third place in the world championship, leapfrogging the absent Kimi Raikkonen and Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton, who finished ninth at Interlagos after a drive-through penalty for contact that KO’d the Williams-Renault of Finn, Valtteri Bottas.

Hamilton’s two points and teammate Nico Rosberg’s 10 for fifth place clinched second place for Mercedes in the constructors’ championship ahead of Ferrari, whose Felipe Massa earned six points for seventh place after a drive-through penalty for crossing a white line at the pit entry.

Ferrari might have overhauled Mercedes had Massa finished with the podium or fourth place for which he was on course.

Jenson Button gave McLaren its best finish of a hugely disappointing season – fourth from 14th on the grid, while departing teammate Sergio Perez went from 19th to sixth.

Australia’s Daniel Ricciardo qualified in the top 10 again and collected the final point in the race for 10th in his farewell to Scuderia Toro Rosso before replacing Webber at Red Bull Racing.

While Webber will be off racing a Porsche sports car next year, Ricciardo will become Australia’s flagbearer in F1.

Although the new F1 rules will introduce very different cars with 1.6-litre turbocharged engines, the chemistry looks good – Red Bull money and management, Adrian Newey’s technical genius and a 24-year-old Aussie with “half a ton” of GPs under his belt and hungry for his first podium – and more.

images: www.photo-4.com and www.redbull.com/au

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