MOTORSPORT: Webber, Briscoe, Power go for gold

Monaco and Indy magic, then Charlotte's big one
A huge weekend of motorsport coming up, with the Monaco Grand Prix on Sunday night, Australian time, then the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR's longest race, the Coca-Cola 600, on Monday morning, our time.

Australia has a chance of scoring a top-five finish in both of the open-wheeler races, with Mark Webber in what his Red Bull Formula 1 boss calls the best form of his career and two Aussie starters in the Indy 500 -- Ryan Briscoe, from the outside of the front row, and Will Power from 23rd in the field of 33.

There's no Aussie representative in NASCAR's main game, the Sprint Cup, yet, but Marcos Ambrose will go round in the secondary Nationwide Series on Sunday morning, Australian time, at Charlotte in North Carolina, his American home track.

Meanwhile, it's been announced this week that Australia's world rally championship star, Chris Atkinson, and his Norwegian former world champion teammate Petter Solberg will have the new-model Subaru for next week's seventh round of the WRC.

The Australian Auto Sport Alliance's alternative Australian Rally Championship kicks off this weekend at Bathurst -- and a very low-key debut it looks like being.

And further evidence has emerged of rallying's problems in Australia, with a severe caning for the sport in another NSW regional centre.

We'll come back to most of these matters, but firstly something that struck us as preposterous this week.

AJ way out of bounds with A1 proposal
Australia's last F1 world champion, Alan Jones, called for A1 GP to replace the F1 grand prix at Melbourne's Albert Park.

"It would probably only cost 5 per cent of what it does now," said Jones, who is principal of the Australian team in A1's World Cup of Motorsport.

"We could race with the V8s (Supercars) and put on a good show, and we wouldn't insist on running at night (as F1 chief Bernie Ecclestone wants, to attract a bigger European TV audience)."

These comments appeared in Melbourne's Herald-Sun, Australia's biggest-selling daily newspaper.

Jones, the 1980 F1 world champion and a former Australian Grand Prix Corporation board member, was said to believe that F1 is doomed in Melbourne once its contract runs out in 2010, and wants to talk to "someone at Melbourne (major) events" about replacing it with the nation-against-nation A1.

He supposedly reckoned that A1 -- which from the start of its fourth season in September will use Ferrari-powered cars modelled on the scuderia's 2004 F1 machines but built at the old Penske base in Britain -- would draw a big crowd at Albert Park.

Now Alan Jones can be a bit of a stirrer, and we suspect that's what he is being in this case, rather than honestly believing that A1 could be a subsitute or replacement for F1 at Albert Park.

Sure the cost of staging A1 would be a lot less.

While we have quite enjoyed the little we have seen of the A1 racing in its first three seasons, it draws only modest crowds in most countries it visits, and does not command serious race sanction fees like F1 -- and, in some countries, very possibly including Australia, we're not sure it attracts any rights fee.

We have heard that the A1 organisers wanted sanction fees of around US$3 million a round in the fourth season, but we doubt they will get anything like that for another event at Sydney's Eastern Creek.

They apparently had dreams of extracting up to US$10 million on the Gold Coast as a replacement for the American Champ Car series, before it was folded into the revamped IndyCar series -- which will now provide the international open-wheeler content at Surfers' Paradise for the next six years.

If A1 had little leverage for race fees before, its case has only been weakened by some very recent evidence -- that the final round of its third season on the first weekend of this month, at Brands Hatch in Britain, had an audience of only 49,000 for its live broadcast into the British market on Skysports from 1pm, GMT, on Sunday, May 4.

Compare that with the average audiences on ITV there for European F1 races which are averaging between 3.5 million and 4 million viewers.

This year's Australian GP, was within that range too -- with 3.9 million ITV viewers for a delayed afternoon telecast back in mid-March.

Britain is effectively the headquarters of A1, and the Brands Hatch crowds have always been among the best in the series, but if it can only attract 49,000 viewers there beyond the spectators at the circuit A1 has little future, let alone be portrayed as an alternative to F1.

Alan Jones was a mighty fine racing driver in his prime, indeed he perhaps could have won another world title or two, but suggesting A1 as a replacement at Albert Park will do nothing for his credibility.

Not only is the A1 TV audience a mere poofteenth of F1's, but the likely attendance for it at Albert Park would be a lot further than even F1 of offsetting the set-up costs for the temporary circuit.

Forget it, AJ.

Monaco is McLaren territory, historically anyway
Monaco remains very much the crown in the F1 jewel, although the Brazilian GP has had a bigger TV audience the past two years because world titles have been decided there at the end of those two seasons.

Fernando Alonso won in Monaco last year in a McLaren. The year before he did it in a Renault.

Although his Renault's speed has been improved a lot recently in the Spanish and Turkish GPs, it is unlikely to be enough to allow the dual world champion to become the first winner of a Monaco hat-trick since the incomparable Ayrton Senna.

Renault has not won a GP since late 2006, while Ferrari and McLaren have won all of the past 23 GPs.

Ferrari has won the four straight since its ignominious start to this season in Melbourne, but it has not had a victory in Monaco since Michael Schumacher's in 2001.

McLaren has won 11 times to Ferrari's three in Monaco in the past 20 years, which must make Lewis Hamilton the favorite this weekend.

Hamilton felt he should have been allowed to overtake then teammate Alonso last year to win on the famous streets that form the shortest circuit in the F1 championship at 3.34km (the race distance is also the shortest, at 260.52km).

Hamilton's 2008 teammate, Heikki Kovalainen, does not look like a GP winner yet.

If Ferrari's dominance to date this season continues into Monaco, it may be the turn of world champion and this year's championship leader Kimi Raikkonen to win rather than the more ragged Felipe Massa.

However, Massa has outqualified Raikkonen 4-1 this season -- and qualifying is particularly important in Monaco.

In the BMW-Sauber team young Robert Kubica has outqualified colleague Nick Heidfeld at every GP so far this year.

Giancarlo Fisichella, a GP winner with Jordan and Renault and now with Force India, chalks up his 200th F1 start on Sunday.

But, as always, it will be Aussie Mark Webber we will be watching out for on Sunday night.
 
Red Bull team boss gives Webber big rap
Webber has qualified in the top six twice this year, in Malaysia and Turkey, started seventh in Spain, and finished in the points at the past four GPs, making him "best of the rest" behind the Ferrari, McLaren and BMW sextet in the drivers' championship.

"Mark is in the form of his life at the moment and I think he is driving extremely well," Red Bull Racing team boss Christian Horner said this week.

"The last four races have seen us running pretty much where we expected to be.

"We lost out in the first round (Australia), which was an atypical race in which, unfortunately, neither of our drivers was around to score points at the finish.

"Since then Mark has scored points in every race and David (Coulthard) has come close, with two ninth places finishes in Malaysia and Turkey.

"In general, we have made a significant step forward from last year, both in performance and also in reliability.

"The battle to finish fourth in the championship seems every bit as intense as the one to win it, with our major rivals being Renault, Toyota, Williams and, on occasion Honda.

"We have seen over the last three or four races that we have been very competitive when compared to the works Renault team and Mark and Fernando (Alonso) have had some good races (although Webber could not match Alonso's pace in the Turkish race).

"Reliability is always important, but the new regulations regarding engine and gearbox life make that even more of a factor this year.

"Good reliability usually comes from good design and last year we suffered because the car was such a complete change to anything this team had seen previously.

"Since then, we have strengthened the group in several areas, appointed new project managers and reliability has been one of our main focuses over the winter.

"So far, touch wood, we are one of the few teams with a 100 per cent mechanical reliability record. The gearbox was our Achilles heel last year and we gave away a lot of points because of that.

"Hats off to the whole transmission group who have done an exceptional job with the four-race gearbox."

Designer Adrian Newey said Red Bull "can be reasonably satisfied with where we are after the first quarter of the season".

"The field has tightened up and we are significantly closer to the top than last year, if you look at lap time difference between our times and that of pole position and the race winner," Newey said.

"Certainly the pack behind the top three teams is very tight."

Briscoe, Power and the American dream
If Webber can't bring home some bacon from Monaco, or even if he does, perhaps Ryan Briscoe or Will Power will from the Indianapolis 500.

Racing at speeds of almost 400km/h at The Brickyard can be even more of a lottery than the narrow streets of Monaco.

Sir Jack Brabham led the way for Australians and with rear-engined cars at Indianapolis, while Vern Schuppan is the only Aussie to have been on the podium there and Geoff Brabham finished fourth.

Briscoe, 10th on debut at The Brickyard in 2005 and fifth last year, is in with a big shot this time, starting on the front row for the mighty Team Penske, winners of this classic 14 times before.

The only drivers quicker than the Sydneysider in qualifying were Chip Ganassi Racing's Brisbane-born New Zealander Scott Dixon and Englishman Dan Wheldon, already an Indy 500 victor.

While Power will start from the middle of the seventh row, this is a race that can be won from anywhere -- although the Queenslander's lack of superspeedway racing experience could count against him.

The David Richards/Prodrive-led team is counting on this hatchback turning around Subaru's WRC fortunes after some miserable seasons.

The WRC2008 has a new livery, remaining blue but with the familiar gold replaced by silver and white.

Atkinson is already third in the championship, behind only Ford's Mikko Hirvonen and Citroen's multiple world champion Sebastien Loeb, is consistently outshining his Norwegian former world champion teammate Petter Solberg and this car could make or break him.

Meanwhile, the Australian Auto Sport Alliance's rally series, touted when announced early in the year as an alternative to the official Australian Rally Championship, kicks off this weekend at Bathurst -- but you could be excused for not knowing.

Promotion of the series appears almost non-existent (in that sense it is mirroring the ARC) but we see on rallysportmag.com.au there are close to 50 entries, including Ed Ordynski, Ron Cremen, Brad Goldsborough and last year's Southern Cross series winner, Jamie Waterhouse.

The two- day event is to be held in the Sunny Corner State Forest, with 225km of competition, only 160km of liaison stages, and with a central service area.

Prizemoney is a grand total of $2,700, with $500 for first place in each of the two-wheel-drive, four-wheel-drive and classic categories!

Organisers of the official ARC series have come in for some severe stick over the move of the NSW round from Forster to Coffs Harbour.

In a front-page splash, headlined "Rally does a runner", the Great Lakes Advocate newspaper said:

"Forster has lost the Great Lakes Rally, one of the town's biggest events.

"Australian Rally Championship organisers knew weeks ago the Forster leg had been scrapped, but only told local officials last Tuesday.

"The ARC website still lists the race for September 20-21, 2008, although an article about the rally's move to Coffs Harbour has also been posted.

"Four ARC media staffers in four separate conversations failed to mention the rally's axing to the Advocate earlier this month.

"A Hunter consortium which brought the 2007 rally to Forster were outbid by a rival Coffs Harbour group for the 2008 event.

"Negotiations were settled weeks ago, but Great Lakes Council was kept in the dark.

"An ARC press release announced the Coffs Harbour Rally would resume on November 15-16 after an eight-year hiatus. 'The Australian Rally Commission (ARCom) has been working for some weeks with members of the NSW rally community to identify a time and location for the NSW round of the ARC following advice the event would not proceed at its original Forster location,' ARCom chairman Colin Trinder said in a press release.

"The Great Lakes Rally's demise is the latest in a string of public relations disasters. Rally fans last year faced confusion over ticket outlets, vantage points and even the race route.

"Great Lakes tourism manager Richard Old said: 'Every driver and competing team was full of praise for the Great Lakes location, but there were major issues with the organisers. It's a shame that it's going after just a year.' "

Shame, yes. Surprise, no.

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