MOTORSPORT: Uphill start for new V8 Supercar chief

Queensland treasurer balks at Gold Coast race subsidy
New V8 Supercars (V8SC) chief executive James Warburton straps into the organisation’s driver’s seat on Monday and it’s an uphill start. Indeed, Warburton, the former chief executive of Ten Network and before that sales supremo at Seven Network, will need to draw on all his sales and strategic skills from day one.

The Queensland Budget will be handed down on Tuesday and there have been reports this week that the state government’s $7-8 million contribution to the Gold Coast 600 – formerly Indy – may be axed or at least reduced.

The government’s $2-3 million annual input to Townsville’s round of the V8 Supercar Championship and the $300,000 to the one at Ipswich’s Queensland Raceway are said to be safe. However, the state government may be looking to the Gold Coast City Council to at least share the funding of the GC600 (if not take it on entirely) if the event is to continue beyond the expiry of its contract this year.

Warburton is to go straight into meetings with Queensland government officials (including tourism minister, Jann Stuckey) to try to save the government subsidy.

But he can expect to run into some roadblocks straight away.

Queensland treasurer Tim Nicholls said this week: “We need to make sure we get value for money from the investment we make, whether that’s in V8 Supercars, whether that’s in the winter (horse) racing carnival, whether that’s in any of the events that are supported by Tourism and Events Queensland. I think taxpayers would expect nothing less and would always want us to be very careful if we were handing out money to private enterprise that is already very profitable.”

Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate obviously would prefer that the government maintain its contribution but appears resigned to his council having to find at least part of the $7-8 million if racing is to continue on the streets of Surfers Paradise each October after this year.

Warburton will take up the day-to-day V8 Supercar reins while the organisation is still without a permanent chairman following James Strong’s death almost three months ago. Long-time executive chairman Tony Cochrane’s exited late last year.

Warburton’s arrival comes amid other significant developments including majority owner, private equity firm Archer Capital, replacing one of its members of the V8 Supercar board. Archer’s Andrew Gray has been replaced by more senior Rishabh Mehrotra. The operation is also said to be seeking more cost savings at the sport’s headquarters.

There also are moves aimed at cutting the cost of racing, with the Car of the Future (CotF) having proven much more expensive than was foreshadowed and teams now not receiving any dividend from the organising body (not so long ago around $800,000 per car annually).

There also is the cloud over Ford’s future in V8 Supercar racing in the wake of the announcement it will stop building the Falcon in 2016 and speculation about the future of the factory Holden Racing Team (winless since Bathurst 2011), despite denials by the late Tom Walkinshaw’s son, Ryan.

The young Walkinshaw claimed to be intent on beating the dominant Red Bull Racing Australia of Triple Eight Race Engineering’s Roland Dane and said HRT was intertwined with the Walkinshaw family-owned Holden Special Vehicles.

“We are going to be doing V8 Supercars as long as we are doing road cars in Australia – that is why we are here,” Walkinshaw said.

On the future of the GC600, category stalwart Dick Johnson acknowledged this week that Queensland premier Campbell Newman “has got to review every single aspect of the expenditure of the state and obviously any event has got its head on the chopping block”.

“But realistically it [GC600] brings an awful lot to the Gold Coast and I think it well and truly justifies the expenditure,” Johnson said.

Cochrane, although distanced from V8 Supercars now, said losing the event would be a major blow to the Gold Coast.

“If that was to happen, an industry that spent 17 years growing up on the Gold Coast and employing more than 1000 people would slowly be lost over the next two to three years,” he said.

Gold Coast MP Alex Douglas, pleading for the state government to continue its input, said: “If you are going to put the curtains on an event like this you give them at least a few years’ warning… You say that ‘by a certain date we are not going to fund such and such’… You don’t just put the shutters up and say that’s it, get up and go home. It’s a major event.”

Not as major --especially in terms of TV exposure, nationally and internationally -- as the hype so long claimed, the Newman government’s scrutiny perhaps has uncovered.

Warburton may need to be at full throttle immediately to save the GC600.

F1 runs into opposition in Bangkok
The Gold Coast 600 isn’t the only event on a temporary street circuit in the melting pot at the minute.

A Formula One street race in Thailand planned for Bangkok from 2015 “is under intensifying pressure from critics who questioned the location, the old town, and even the event itself,” according the Bangkok Post newspaper.

It reported that residents of 20 Bangkok communities had met this week, angry at the proposal by the Sports Authority of Thailand and the Tourism and Sports Ministry. Thailand’s Stop Global Warming Association president Srisuwam Janya said “the purpose of organising this event is to promote car manufacturers, not tourism as claimed”.

This has echoes of Melbourne 20 years ago, when the Australian Grand Prix was poached from Adelaide amid huge outcry about its impact on inner Melbourne’s Albert Park.

While the GP has been held there since 1996, usually as the first race of each world championship, F1 correspondent Joe Saward blogged this week that “there is clearly a big push going on to make Bahrain the opening race of the 2014 season, at least if Melbourne does not rapidly agree to a new contract from 2016 onwards”.

“In general such date changes seem to be linked to contract negotiations and, with Melbourne discussing [with F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone] the next deal from 2016-2020, with an option to extend to 2025, it is no great surprise that pressure in being applied,” Saward blogged.

Saward reported separately that American television network NBC’s coverage of last Sunday’s Monaco GP “was watched by nearly 1.5 million viewers in the United States, making it the most watched F1 race in the US for six years”.

“According to the Nielsen Company, the live coverage of the race [the first time that Monaco had been aired live in the US on free-to-air TV] was watched by 1.456 million viewers,” Saward wrote.

“The last race to get that kind of coverage [in the US] was Fox’s 2007 coverage of the United States GP [at Indianapolis].

“This was an increase of 241 per cent compared to last year’s coverage on Speed [pay TV].

“The F1 races that have been shown on the NBC Sports cable network have not rated as highly, with viewers numbers at around 400,000.”

The positive for motorsport in all this is that F1’s best-known GP has reached a lot more viewers in the world’s major market, yet it also brings perspective to occasional outlandish claims still that F1 – and Australia’s GP – have a global audience of hundreds of millions.

It fits with authorative research – especially by London analyst Kevin Alavy - reported on here over the years that indicates the average global audience for a GP is about 30 million viewers.

The Nielson data also exposes the absurdity of a newspaper report published nationally in Australia recently that the new V8 Supercar event in Texas a fortnight ago would reach 100 million American viewers.

Briscoe gets Indy seat in Motor City
Ryan Briscoe has scored another IndyCar drive – at this weekend’s “double-header’ in Motor City, Detroit.

The 31-year-old from Sydney will compete in the 70-lap races on the streets there on Saturday and Sunday for Panther Racing, which has sacked Californian JR Hildebrand after too many crashes – including one in the opening stages of last weekend’s Indianapolis 500.

Hildebrand almost won that classic as a rookie two years ago but crashed at the final turn and wound up second to Englishman Dan Wheldon (who died in a crash at the end of that season).

Spaniard Oriel Servia is expected to take over the Panther drive beyond Detroit with Briscoe’s sports car commitments clashing with several Indy races.

Briscoe, who drove for Roger Penske in IndyCar until the end of last season, raced for Chip Ganassi at Indianapolis last Sunday as a one-off and finished 12th.

Australia’s IndyCar regular Will Power is hoping to get his season back on course with Penske in Detroit after coming close to the title the past three years, finishing runner-up each time.

Seventeen of Power’s 18 IndyCar wins have been on street and road circuits but he is only 14th, and 79 points behind new series leader Marco Andretti, after five races this season.

Fellow Australian Marcos Ambrose is still only 22nd in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup despite his second top 10 finish of the year last weekend at Charlotte – after a TV cable that fell on the track caught his Ford Fusion and severed a brake line.

NASCAR allowed 15 minutes for cars damaged by the errant cable to be repaired and gave Ambrose back four laps he had lost.

He praised the series organisers for their professionalism but said the cable had been “a lot better than hitting a kangaroo” before moving on to this weekend’s Sprint Cup round on the high-banked one-mile (1.6km) oval at Dover, Delaware.