Geoffrey Harris•6 Nov 2013

NEWS

MOTORSPORT: Sugar-coating long-held cane fields dream

It's been talked about for years but the idea of a grand, permanent mecca for motorsport in south-east Queensland remains just that ... talk

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Billion-dollar boast, yet still no sign of green light for Norwell project

An elaborate plan for a permanent race circuit and theme park near the Gold Coast, with a price tag that began at $650 million and this year has been put as high as $2.5 billion, is still being projected as a big goer despite little evidence of progress in 6½ years.

It's portrayed as akin to the lavish new tracks that have been built in the Middle East and Asia in recent years. If it happened it would be the nearest thing to Abu Dhabi's spectacular circuit that hosted last weekend's round of the Formula One World Championship with its Ferrari World theme park next door.

Yet the "wheels" are turning slowly, if at all, in the canefields that are the proposed site at Norwell, almost equidistant between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Would-be developer IMETT, the acronym for Integrated Motorsport Education Tourism and Technology, described it quaintly a while back as "shovel ready", as though the first sod could be turned any day.

A pretty simple Google search turned up that IMETT Group Pty Ltd was established in 2004, employs a staff of "approximately three" and that its annual revenue is estimated at $67,849.

No, we haven't forgotten any zeroes there.

Yet, in the wake of last month's Gold Coast 600 on Surfers Paradise's annual temporary street circuit, IMETT managing director Ron Brown has told Brisbane's Channel 7: "We're looking to invest, over the next three years, very close to $1 billion."

The IMETT proposal broke cover in April 2007, with a front page splash in Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper. That story claimed the Norwell venue would become a motorsport "epicentre".

"The world-class international motor racing complex is only weeks away from final approval," it proclaimed.

Its first big event was to be as the headquarters of the first World Rally Championship event in eastern Australia, scheduled for September 2008 – the start of what was supposed to be a 15-year contract.

That event never happened and Rally Australia eventually was resurrected in NSW, initially in the Northern Rivers area and subsequently around Coffs Harbour.

All the land IMETT wanted, as it anticipated the sugarcane fields at Norwell would eventually go, had not been acquired in 2007.

The size of the proposed site has blown out 50 per cent since, to almost 600 hectares, but it's still not secured, let alone approved and rezoned for motor racing.

We dissected the original proposal and Courier-Mail report here on April 4, 2007, and concluded that – as things stood then – it was far more fantasy than fact. An inspired editor used a picture of cuckoo clocks with our article.

Three years later, after it had been given the thumbs down by Queensland's Co-Ordinator General under the state's former Labor government, we noticed that the drums were still beating for the project.

Early this year in the Gold Coast Bulletin newspaper the IMETT project had become "a $2.5 billion super motorsports precinct".

A master plan was to have been submitted to the now-conservative Queensland government by March-April.

That didn't happen.

Now it's to be early next year.

So the project is still a long way from getting any green light, yet there is talk of spending $1 billion over the next three years. It's supposed to create 2000 jobs in the construction phase and 5000 beyond that.

Apart from being a home for community motorsport and a centre for driver education and housing a theme park, a hotel is part of the plans.

Its supporters have included five-time motorcycle world champion and nearby resident Mick Doohan, now chairman of the Australian Karting Association.

Doohan is pictured on IMETT's website, at the bottom of its string of "news" statements, with Italian ex-F1 driver Jarno Trulli, a leading international kart manufacturer.

Touring car legend Dick Johnson, also based nearby, was hugely enthusiastic about it in the original Courier-Mail story. "This project is what we have needed for a long time," Johnson said.

Not only is IMETT's dream supposed to be more viable than races on temporary street circuits but it's not meant to need government financial input – i.e., taxpayer dollars.

Another early supporter was low-profile but influential Brisbane-based powerbroker Garry Connelly, who ran Rally Australia for much of its two decades in WA. Connelly was to have been chairman of the event organising committee for that WRC event at Norwell in 2008. He's now a vice-president of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), the world governing body of motorsport.

IMETT has linked other big names to the project too.

It claims Herman Tilke, the German responsible for designing most of the modern F1 tracks, has been working with it for a decade on a 6.5km circuit.

And then there's Forrec, the Canadian company it says is "the world's most pre-eminent designer of themed precincts and theme parks". Except that Forrec's website does not list IMETT among its illustrious list of clients around the globe.

V8 Supercars chief executive James Warburton has said that Australia's premier motor racing championship needs better tracks and he told the Channel 7, for the same report in which Brown talks of spending a billion dollars over the next three years, that the IMETT project is "certainly spectacular" and "we'll do our bit to assist where we can".

Brown said, very generously, in a "Christmas 2012 Update Message" that IMETT had allowed the Campbell Newman government elected in March last year "time to settle in".

But Brown clearly thought the time had come again to seek approval for his "baby".

After all, IMETT had "an increasing number of ‘blue-chip' project partners ... has quite rightly been recognised as one of the world's more exciting integrated developments, for which there is no precedent in Australia ... [and it would be] the Gold Coast's largest single new-job creation project".

Elsewhere IMETT has said that its project "is understood to be the largest permanent job creation project in Australia".

Its proposed site is close to Darlington Park, which was an adventurous, maverick attempt to create a permanent circuit some years ago that failed to get Confederation of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) approval. Its bitumen is now the road through an industrial park.

Also nearby is the Performance Driving Centre operated by now part-time V8 Supercar racer Paul Morris.

IMETT's site is close to a freeway and there has been talk of a light rail link from the Yatala train station to ferry spectators. European company Bombardier has even been consulted about providing it.

It's all hugely ambitious.

Permanent tracks make a lot more sense than setting up and dismantling street circuits, with all the disruption they cause – even if they can have terrific atmosphere. But any new motor racing venue needs to be, in the first instance, achievable and, longer term, sustainable – financially and environmentally.

We have sought to speak to IMETT's Brown and the project's media liaison Amanda Fay, but there has been no response to our messages. Ms Fay, we note, is based at Margaret River in Western Australia, not exactly on the doorstep of Norwell.

We discover via the internet that she is "head of all marketing and communications activity" for IMETT and "involved in project development strategy". Further, she describes herself as having "the ability to alter the written word to suit a number of key audiences".

We translate that to being able to talk a good story.

Except that Ms Fay and Mr Brown are not talking any story to us.

So, for the record, we pose a few simple questions:

How much land does IMETT have? Is it freehold or leasehold? And what constraints are on it?
When is approval going to be sought again for IMETT's proposal at Norwell?
UK and US investors are said to be committed to the project. Who are they, how much are they committed for, and in what form - equity capital, loans or some other way?
Why has there been no mention of major Australian investors? Are Australian investors, and particularly Australian financial institutions, not willing to fund the project?
And can Australian motorsport fans genuinely expect to see racing at IMETT's proposed site. If so, when?

Picture courtesy Peter Forster/Wikimedia Commons

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MOTORSPORT: Sugar-coating long-held cane fields dream

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