MOTORSPORT: Sydney quandary on V8 Supercars

Championship round at Sydney Motorsport Park last August lost more than $600,000 for the Australian Racing Drivers Club and no sign of new deal for event on Olympic streets.

ARDC would have been in red but for government money

The V8 Supercar community is cock-a-hoop today over its new American event, but it has a huge headache in what should still be its major market – Sydney.

The Australian Racing Drivers Club, operator of Sydney Motorsport Park (SMP, formerly known as Eastern Creek), has revealed it lost more than $600,000 staging a round of the V8 Supercar Championship last August, while the future of the Sydney 500 on streets at the 2000 Olympics site is in doubt beyond the end of a five-year contract expiring in December.

A three-day attendance of 68,000 was announced for the Austin 400 in Texas, which concluded this morning, compared with the 24,341 announced for the two days of the event at SMP last August 25-26.

ARDC chief executive Glenn Matthews spoke hopefully before that event of Sydney Motorsport Park returning permanently to the V8 Supercar Championship calendar but options to do so have not been exercised.

We mentioned here some months ago talk that the ARDC had dropped about $500,000 on the August event, which was added to last year’s championship calendar in April 2012 after V8 Supercars failed to secure another overseas round to “twin” with the Abu Dhabi event, which has disappeared from the series this season.

The ARDC – 60 years old and creator of The Great Race at Bathurst – now has revealed that the financial damage was at least 20 per cent worse than half a million dollars.

Page 2 of the ARDC’s annual report for 2012 contains this paragraph: “A round of the V8s was held, at short notice. While hosting the event had a number of strategic positive outcomes, financially it had a loss exceeding $600,000.”

The “short notice” was four months – at a permanent circuit, fresh from a $12 million upgrade, including $7 million in grants from the NSW government over three years, and a rebranding on which more than $560,000 appears to have been spent.

The financial outcome could be a hot potato at tomorrow’s annual meeting of the ARDC.

Questions might be asked how an organisation with the ARDC’s experience and supposed expertise absorbed the financial risk of staging a V8 Supercar round rather than lease the venue to the series organiser to run.

The ARDC annual report reflects an annual profit for calendar 2012 of $3,463,560, but that includes $4 million of the government money that has gone into the upgrade of the venue.

Without that $4 million washing through the ARDC’s accounts in that year it would have shown a loss of more than $500,000.

While the ARDC’s total assets rose more than 50 per cent over the year, from $12.3 million to $17.1 million, its cash position deteriorated from almost $4.4 million at the end of 2011 to $385,963 at the end of last year.

And borrowings of more than $750,000 – in the form of a line of credit from the Commonwealth Bank (due to expire on November 30, 2014) – appeared in the accounts.

Before changing its accounting period to the calendar year the ARDC had shown a profit of $210,786 for the last six months of 2011. For the 12 months to the end of June 2011 its profit was $3,606,999.

The accounts for those two earlier periods covering 18 months show spending of $563,372 on “brand marketing strategy” – $348,169 in the year to June 30, 2011, and another $215,203 in the following six months.

The latest accounts, for calendar 2012, show another $369,190 going on what have been categorised simply as “marketing costs”.

Long-time V8 Supercar executive chairman Tony Cochrane – who departed that position late last year after a fall-out with majority owner Archer Capital – had bagged Eastern Creek and the ARDC unmercifully after the 2008 championship round at the circuit.

Cochrane, then in the throes of his successful campaign to create the Sydney 500 at Homebush, vowed that the Creek would “never see a V8 race again”.

“We have no intention of going back to Eastern Creek irrespective of what happens in Sydney [at the Olympic site],” Cochrane declared.

“They have a shocking history – and the only thing good in their history was losing.”

A V8 Supercar pre-season test day and season launch subsequently was held at the Creek in early 2011 (and this year) and, when negotiations for what is believed to have been a championship round in South Korea in 2012 failed, the series organiser suddenly needed another event in Australia.

Then V8 Supercars chief executive David Malone said at the time that a second Sydney round that season “became viable”, while NSW tourism and major events minister George Souris called it “a major win for western Sydney”, with “the commercial costs completely covered by the ARDC and V8 Supercars Australia at no cost to the NSW government”.

ARDC chief executive Matthews – who had joined the organization after a quarter of a century at the Panthers Group at Penrith – said that “having the V8 boys back in town” was “the perfect platform to relaunch the new Eastern Creek”.

“I’m extremely confident. We’ve been working over the last 20 months to transform the ARDC and the venue,” Matthews said.

“We’re transforming the business to really become the premier destination of motorsport in Australia.”

Leading team owner Roland Dane – of Triple Eight Race Engineering, which ran so successfully for years as Team Vodafone and this season has transformed into Red Bull Racing Australia – was a strong supporter of the return to Eastern Creek.

“It’s the only permanent circuit in the Sydney basin. We should be here,” Dane said after the August event.

“I hope we are here in the future. I think it has been a good return. It was good to see a good, enthusiastic crowd – real avid race fans.

“I’m a big supporter and I hope we’re back here next year – and every year.”

It wasn’t a happy return though for the ARDC – certainly not for its beancounters – and perhaps the membership, now that it knows the financial outcome.

And, with Oran Park gone to suburbia and the Sydney 500 at Homebush having failed to reach anywhere near the heights its champion Cochrane had predicted so long and loudly, and its contract nearing expiry without any sign of it being renewed (certainly with any big bundle of money from NSW’s now conservative O’Farrell government), there must be serious doubt whether Australia’s biggest city will have a V8 Supercar Championship round next year.

Aussies on second and eighth row for Indy 500

Australians Will Power and Ryan Briscoe have qualified sixth and 23rd for the 97th Indianapolis 500 next Monday morning, Australian time.

Ed Carpenter, stepson of controversial former Indianapolis Motor Speedway and IndyCar series boss Tony George, will start America’s biggest open-wheeler race from pole position after averaging 228.762mph – or 368.16kmh! – over the 10 miles (16km) of his four-lap qualifying run at The Brickyard.

Power had been fastest before the final runs of the top nine qualifiers but tapped the Speedway’s notorious concrete wall – although without serious damage or injury.

Colombian rookie Carlos Munoz will start in the middle of the front row with Marco Andretti on his outside.

Power, from Toowoomba and driving one three Chevrolet-powered Dallara cars owned by 15-time winning Indy 500 team boss Roger Penske, is on the outside of the second row, with Sydneysider Briscoe – in a one-off start for Chip Ganassi in a Honda-engined Dallara – in the middle of the eighth row.

Chevrolet engines are in 17 of the 33 cars in the field, including the 10 fastest drivers, while the other 16 have Honda powerplants - Canadian Alex Tagliani in the fastest of them.

Defending winner Dario Franchitti will start in the middle of the field, but he won from there last year.

For the third time in four years four women have made the field – Swiss driver Simona de Silvestro, Brazilian Anna Beatriz and Brits Pippa Mann and Katherine Legge.

See the full starting line-up here.

Modern NASCAR’s top gun Jimmie Johnson has won the non-championship All-Star Race at Charlotte, North Carolina, for a record fourth time in a Chevrolet. Australia’s Marcos Ambrose finished 17th of the 22 drivers in the race in his Ford.

The second biggest race of NASCAR’s Sprint Cup, the Coca-Cola 600, will be run at the same oval track just hours after the Indy 500.

Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site...

MOTORSPORT: Sydney quandary on V8 Supercars

Tags