MOTORSPORT: The Un-Australian GP

It's a disgrace the way our champions are treated
The Australian Grand Prix has lost its spirit. Lost its soul. Its heart. Its compass (satnav?). Lost its way.

We should be celebrating 25 years of the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix this weekend. We should also be celebrating the 50th anniversary of Aussie Sir Jack Brabham's first F1 world championship.

Some people will celebrate the former, and some will remember the latter. But any celebrations this weekend will be hollow now.

Sir Jack Brabham, who went on to win two other world titles in 1960 and 1966, the last of them in a car of his own construction -- the only driver to do that -- and powered by an Australian-built Repco engine, won't be at the Australian GP.

Nor will Alan Jones, the only other Australian to have won the F1 world title -- in 1980.

There will be an F1 race in Melbourne's Albert Park late Sunday afternoon -- the world's first twilight GP.

Hopefully a good one, with cars made to new rules that may make the racing a whole lot more exciting and driven by a crop of superb talents -- Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton, Kimi Raikkonen, Felipe Massa, Robert Kubica, Nico Rosberg, Sebastian Vettel, and Australian Mark Webber.

There will be an abundance of squabbling and politics in the F1 paddock too, about the diffusers at the rear of the Toyota, Brawn (nee Honda) and Williams cars, about moves to cut the sport's costs, about the championship points system and how the world title ought to be decided, and whatever else.

But Australia's two world champions will be at home on Queensland's Gold Coast, probably watching it on TV, but feeling unwanted, unloved, even humiliated.

The organisation that is meant to be the caretaker of F1 in Australia, the Australian Grand Prix Corporation, is at odds with Sir Jack and AJ.

There are questions about whether the pair were invited, or at least properly invited, to this weekend's event, and perhaps some argument about who should foot the bill for their airfares and accommodation.

There should be no such arguments. In a sense this pair don't need any invitation to attend the Australian GP, or indeed any GP.

They are among the greats of the sport and their presence lights up the paddock. Indeed, the circuit and its surrounds. They are, along with the late Peter Brock, the greatest racing drivers and racing heroes Australia has had.

F1 came to Australia in the mid-1980s largely on the back of AJ's success a few short years earlier and the legend that "Black Jack" had created earlier still.

These guys took on the world and conquered it. The essence of the Aussie battler spirit.

Yet they are treated so shabbily, not by the sport that made them famous but by those who are meant to be the custodians of that sport in Australia.

It is a disgrace. What must people in, or followers of, other sports think? Imagine a Melbourne Cup without Bart Cummings!

While Jack and AJ look on from afar, Stirling Moss -- a knight too these days, and in our eyes second only to Ayrton Senna as F1's most charistmatic figure -- will be feted around Albert Park this weekend by the very same organisers who treat Jack and AJ so poorly.

Yet Moss never won a world title. Our "boys" won four between them.

No quibbles among those GP organisers about a few bucks to cover Stirling's travel and lodgings, we bet.

And, even more damning, the management team that has snubbed our own pair of world champions and is on course to produce a loss of around $50 million on this weekend's event will no doubt be lining up again soon for more bonuses out of taxpayers' money.

Any bonus can hardly be called performance-related. For the meaning of performance in the F1 caper take a look at the records of Jack Brabham and Alan Jones.

And the Victorian government acquiesces in it all. It ought to be scrutinising that management team far more closely. And the AGPC board too.

For the record, that board is chaired by Ron Walker, AC, CBE. Around the board table with Walker are deputy chairman John Harnden, a former CEO of the AGPC and Melbourne's 2006 Commonwealth Games, Gillian Franklin, James Strong, the one-time Qantas chief, Alan Oxley, Laura Anderson, Patrick Flanagan, Ken Ryan and William Bowness.

Not only ought the government be wanting to know how this Brabham-Jones fiasco has come to what it is, but what's being done about it. And about the management of the event.

Sure times are a bit tough (although you would hardly know it from last weekend's Clipsal 500 in Adelaide and tonight's AFL sold-out season-opening game in Melbourne), but there are only about half the number of grandstand seats in Albert Park this week that there were a few years back.

Corporate hospitality is way down too, with not one suite on the Lakeside any longer. The general admission numbers on Sunday may be saved by The Who concert, but there's not a lot of future in old rockers.

A couple of weeks ago this author, a former GP media manager, had a coffee with AGPC chief executive Drew Ward. We had a pleasant enough chat, during which Ward told us that a lot of this year's event would be a tribute to history -- 40 years of Formula Ford, and Formula 5000 cars on the program.

We inquired about any tribute for the 50th anniversary of Jack Brabham's first world title, clinched in such astonishing circumstances at Sebring in Florida. Brabham had run out of fuel and had to push his Cooper-Climax the last 800 metres, finishing fourth while a young New Zealander Bruce McLaren won his first GP (before starting the iconic team that still bears his name).

Brabham had been invited to this year's GP, we were told, but the form of tribute had not yet crystalised.

That seemed odd. Surely something could have been put in place months earlier. We suggested that, at the least, Sir Jack ought to be in an open-top car on Sunday's parade lap with today's F1 drivers.

The matter seemed to us to have been left inordinately late, until a time when surely the organisers are busy enough on other things. Relations between the AGPC and our two world champions have, unfortunately, long been frosty. But now they have sunk to a new low. Unacceptable depths.

F1 will go on -- this Sunday, the rest of the year, and beyond. There's a contract in place for it to continue in Australia, in Melbourne, until 2015. But F1, in Australia, without our world champions Brabham and Jones around is not the F1 that, for all its many sins, we knew and loved.

How ironic that Brabham is acknowledged more in America -- a country that has never truly embraced F1 - on the golden anniversary of his first world title than in his own country. Or, we should say, at his home GP.

We spotted Brabham, at a distance, at the Phillip Island Historic Motorsport Carnival two weeks ago -- before the rain set in and, in his 80s and on kidney dialysis, he was ushered away to shelter. But there was a buzz in that damp air that he was among the faithful, and we heard anecdotes of how much he enjoyed it. Lapped it up, so to speak. As it ought to be.

Jones, now approaching senior years too, remembers Brabham as one of his childhood heroes and regards him as a national treasure.

What used to be the Gold Coast Indy, now calling itself SuperGP (combining V8 Supercars and the A1GP open-wheeler series in which Jones is the Australian team principal), this week named Sir Jack, his eldest son Geoff, and Geoff's son Matthew its No. 1, 2 and 3 ticketholders for its October 22-25 event.

It's a bit of a stunt but it sits easily with the Gold Coast being Sir Jack's retirement home ground.

Geoff Brabham was an accomplished racer, his victories including the 1993 Le Mans 24-hour sports car classic, four IMSA titles in the US, a CanAm championship and the 1997 Bathurst 1000 for 2-litre touring cars.

Matthew, 15, is a budding karter and already a winner of four state titles. Along with Jack's other two sons, Gary and David, the Brabhams are Australia's first family of motorsport.

Jonesey too is a motor racing thoroughbred. His late father Stan was an Australian GP winner (pre F1 days obviously).

If the idea of deciding the world champion on the most races won in a season rather than the most points -- which, briefly, was going to be introduced this season but was suddenly postponed until next year -- was retrospective AJ would be a two-time world champion. He remains perhaps the most favored "son" of the Williams F1 team that has seen such a parade of driving talent through its cockpits.

Because of his no-nonsense approach. Because he tells it how he sees it. Because, in an F1 car in his prime, he was as good as anyone on his day. And because he gave it his all. And more.

In F1, in Australia, Sir Jack Brabham and Alan Jones are 24-carat gold. We should celebrate them in our midst.

Quite tragically, they won't be where they belong this weekend.

The show will go on, but sadly it won't be the same.

Images: (in order) Sir Jack Brabham - Highcroft Racing; Alan Jones - grandprix.com; David Brabham - Brabham 50th reenactment - Highcroft Racing