MOTORSPORT: The V8 Supercar TV slide

By the TV industry standard V8 Supercars have lost a lot of ground
Two weeks on from the conclusion of the V8 Supercar Championship something has come into focus. It's the TV picture.

Someone with far easier access to the Oztam data over the years than us has done some homework for us. Far easier and quicker it was than us labouring for days over summer to unearth and analyse that data.

Rather than the "unduplicated" figure of 7.7 million Australian viewers that the Seven Network was talking about after the Oran Park finale, or the 22 million that V8 Supercars Australia was crowing about after the 2007 season (for our previous commentaries on those numbers, see here and here), our contact has got back to the industry standard -- the average audience.

And, based on this research, the average audiences in the five major Australian capital cities for V8 Supercars for the past five seasons, were:
2008    434,000
2007    490,000
2006    504,000
2005    556,000
2004    554,000

Now what these numbers -- the average audiences across all rounds of each of those seasons -- tell us, without having gone back further than five years, is that 2005 was the peak in terms of the five major cities.

V8 Supercars were telecast on the Ten Network for a decade up until 2006, and since then have been back on the Seven Network, where the Australian Touring Car Championship traditionally was.

These numbers look good for Ten, but as they are only for the five capitals they overlook the greater regional reach of the Seven Network.

That aside, the simple table above shows that V8 Supercars were down 11.42 per cent this year on Seven in the five capitals -- from 490,000 in '07 to 434,000.

That is in line with the trend we were seeing in research from the Mitchells agency on which we've commented regularly this year (and links to some which are contained within the second link above).

On this table the 2007 audience on Seven was down 2.97 per cent, from 504,000 to 490,000 in '06, but remember again that these numbers are for the five major cities.

It is generally agreed that the national audience picked up in '07 when the telecasts moved from Ten to Seven because of the latter's broader national reach.

But, perhaps most importantly, what the table shows us is the five-capital audience has declined 21.94 per cent in three years -- from 556,000 in '05 to 434,000 in '08.

Now that has got to be a worry for the sport.

Just what is a growth measuring stick?
It is against that background that we are amazed at some of the twaddle talked in our "cousin" Auto Action magazine's V8 Supercar Summit -- a six-page transcript of a forum of some of the sport's "heavy hitters" which appears in the year-ending edition 1321 of AA.

We found the time to read this spread over the weekend; indeed we read it twice.

The participants in the "summit" were Ford driver James Courtney, championship-winning Team Vodafone principal Roland Dane, Ford Performance Racing race engineer Phil Keed, Walkinshaw Racing chief executive Craig Wilson, Jack Daniel's sponsorship/brand manager Andrew McNamara, media and communications company managing director and PR operative David Segal, and journalists Paul Gover of News Corp and Michael Lynch from Fairfax, chaired by AA editor-at-large Mark Fogarty.

On our two readings of the transcript we cannot find any mention of television. Yet surely TV is the barometer of the health of V8 Supercar racing?

Towards the end of the transcript a couple of the participants, Courtney and Gover, talk about growth in V8 Supercars.

They say it won't be what it has been in the past five years. But what growth are they talking about?

We gather Courtney is going to have quite substantial growth in his pay packet as he moves from Stone Brothers to Jim Beam Racing next season -- and good luck to him for that.

We don't doubt that Roland Dane has seen growth in the revenues of his Triple Eight Race Engineering in recent years, on the back of its success with three Bathurst 1000 wins and now a V8 Supercar Championship with Jamie Whincup.

And we don't doubt that V8 Supercars Australia's revenues from the fees it charges circuits to host rounds of the championship have been rising steadily.

But we're perplexed by the references to growth in what we presume was meant to be the "sport" of V8 Supercars over the past five years.

There has been growth in the TV rights fee that Seven is paying -- quite a multiple, supposedly, of what Ten was paying but distorted somewhat by including the cost of telecast productions by V8SA's own TV unit now.

Strip away all the bulldust and the two measures of the sport are crowds at the tracks and the TV audience.

Attendance figures are notoriously fuzzy in Australian motorsport, and while crowds are respectable in V8 Supercar racing -- and pretty much always have been -- what serious, credible evidence is there of improvement (i.e. growth) in recent years -- and in particular this year?

Certainly not, for one, at the 500km lead-up to Bathurst, held this year at Phillip Island. And certainly not on the TV screens in the five major cities that we alluded to in our opening item and table above.

Now how can nine people within the sport get together for a summit and not face up to such reality? Our recommendation to our "cousins" at Auto Action is that in future editor-at-large Fogarty be a full participating member of the forum rather than just the questioner.

One voice that makes a fair bit of sense
The one voice we felt made a valuable contribution to the summit was Team Vodafone's Roland Dane.

Here are a few excerpts of his wisdom:

<<< "We have very substantial appearance money payments which go to the teams if they fulfil their obligations. And that's the framework which holds us together and that will be enormously important over the next year." (Our comment: perhaps a very good and overlooked, little-understood point).

<<< "It (Ford versus Holden) is increasingly irrelevant ... the most common car that somebody drives to a V8 Supercar race in Australia is a Toyota." (Our comment: we disagree with the initial remark, and believe it to be typical of the dismissive attitude of many in the V8 Supercar community to the importance of the participarting manufacturers and reflective of the increasing distance between Dane's team and Ford, while the latter point, re Toyota, is very pertinent).

<<< "It's a crying shame that there isn't a world-class circuit in WA ... one day somebody at Queensland Raceway will take a Komatsu digger and make it more interesting ... we need to keep on having the permanent circuits (as well as street circuits) but hopefully persuading them to up their game." (Our comment: what a pleasant load of common sense. In our view, a world-class permanent circuit in WA might ultimately be a way of keeping a Formula 1 world championship round in Australia, as well as providing a western home for V8 Supercars and other forms of racing. Dane will get universal agreement on Queensland Raceway, and it's pleasing to hear a powerbroker with an appreciation of the importance of permanent circuits in the motorsport landscape).

<<< "What the governments are putting in (to street races) in terms of our racing is tiny, and the returns are very evident." (Our comment: not sure we see the "very evident" value/return on investment that Dane does, but we note that -- unlike some others in the sport -- he refrains from blatantly outlandish claims).

<<< "In terms of its (the V8 Supercar business) structure and how it's managed, it's not at the moment. The old management stayed around too long." (Our comment: interesting that such perspective, obviously kept in-house for a long time, seeps out after the recent change of management guard. We note that Walkinshaw Racing's Wilson said "the people that were involved in management overstayed their time by one or two or three years".)

<<< "Apart from cricket there is nothing that goes to every state and territory in this country and for our sponsors and the media that's a very valuable asset that we have." (Our comment: a very good and often-overlooked point).

So, although we have lamented here regularly that what is still essentially Australia's touring car championship is dominated by foreign-owned teams (Dane's Team Voadfone, Ford Performance Racing and Walkinshaw Performance's Holden Racing Team), we admit that Dane talks a fair bit of sense.

Much of it's common sense. And, as we've said before, the only problem with common sense is that it's not common enough, unfortunately.