MOTORSPORT: Supercars "will be back"

While professional football codes teeter on the edge of financial disaster, Supercars CEO Sean Seamer has expressed confidence Australia’s number one motorsport category is in a position to survive the Covid-19 pandemic and go racing once more.

“It’s not permanent we will be back,” Seamer declared during a media roundtable yesterday.

After completing its opening event in Adelaide in February and then falling victim to the F1 cancellation in early March, Supercars postponed any further live racing until June and pulled together a 10-round esports series as a digital stand-in that kicks off on Fox and Ten Play next week.

If all goes to plan, the real V8 Ford Mustangs and Holden Commodores could still be back in action as soon as the June 5-7 Winton Super400, but spectators are almost certain to be locked out of the track if it goes ahead.

Seamer depicted Supercars as being a much more compact organisation than the Australian Football League (AFL) or the National Rugby League (NRL), both of which have also postponed their seasons, shed many staff and negotiated hefty paycuts at headquarters and among teams.

“I can’t speak for what the other sports are going through, all I can do is focus on what we can control,” said Seamer.

“I think the important distinction I would make (compared to other major sports) is we are a very lean group in the personnel sense. The second point is I would make when we are not racing we are not incurring any costs.

“For us, we are talking about 14 rounds, not 22, not 30, not every weekend, not twice a week. So the challenge we are dealing with is different.”

Supercars draws its revenues from many sources including media rights, event promotion, event license fees usually secured from government, sponsorships, corporate hosting and income generated by its television unit’s external work.

Seamer refused to delve into the specifics of how hard Supercars’ revenues have been hit, but made it clear they had been impacted.

“Everyone is going through tough times right now, we are continuing to monitor stimulus packages and what that means,” he said.”

Seamer highlighted the new Jobkeeper and other government financial initiatives as potential benefits. Supercars is understood to have laid off no staff as a result of the pandemic as yet.

“That (JobKeeper) will have a massive impact on a lot of sports including Supercars; our ability for longevity, but also our ability to understand what the world looks like when we go racing again,” he said.

Supercars remains committed to a 14-event calendar, with the prospect of squeezing those dates into the second half of 2020 and early 2021.

After initially rejecting the concept, Supercars now accepts it will have to at least run some events in 2020 without live fans because of the Coronavirus.

When the postponement of the three events in Tasmania, New Zealand and Western Australia were announced in early March, Seamer said Supercars preferred to race in front of fans.

“We believe it (Supercars) to be one of the very last visceral experiences left on the planet and our position on that hasn’t changed,” he said yesterday. “But at the end of the day our fans, our sponsors, our partners are getting starved for content quite quickly I think,” he said.

“We wanted to take stock, that’s why we postponed those three rounds.”

Seamer admitted there was no guarantee the early June Winton date was achievable.

“June is a best-case scenario,” he said.

“Nobody knows for-sure when and under what circumstances we are going to be able to put an event on. We’ve got multiple permutations of what the calendar can look like, when we can go racing, what is TV-only, what is not TV-only.

“But to project which event is going to be first and when, you’re either lying or you’re Nostradamus.”

Along with the esports series, Seamer also hopes the debut of a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary following the 2019 season of Erebus Motorsport and star driver David Reynolds that premiered on Fox Sports last night will help sate the fans until racing gets underway again.

“That will help our relevance; being front of mind, being able to deliver prime-time ratings even if it is not the same as actually going racing,” he said.

So far in 2020 just one event - the Superloop 500 in Adelaide - and two races have been conducted with the wins split between Kiwi rivals Scott McLaughlin and Shane van Gisbergen.

Meanwhile, Australian racing driver and automotive consultant Renato Loberto has established a website to co-ordinate the motorsport industry's efforts to fight the Coronavirus.

The new website allows racing teams, engineering firms, similar organisations and individuals to register their skills and contact details.

As we've previously reported here and here, Australian motor racing and automotive companies have been quick to offer their design, engineering and manufacturing resources to battle the pandemic.