Motorsport: Why Dick Johnson's beaming

Spirits up at DJR with new backer
Dick Johnson has found the lifeline he needs to keep his V8 Supercar team alive. The new title sponsor of Dick Johnson Racing will be the Kentucky bourbon whiskey brand Jim Beam. Without that financial support, which won't be formally announced until the new year, Ford icon Johnson may have had to shut the doors of his headquarters at Stapylton near Beenleigh, between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

DJR has suffered from the loss of Shell, its major supporter for almost two decades, and then the failure of last year's title sponsor Westpoint, which forced the five-time touring car champion and dual Bathurst winner to inject more than $1 million of his own money into the team this year. Johnson funded it through two of his newer but not yet hugely profitable businesses, First Rock Home Loans and V8 Telecom, as well as selling five of his old race cars to collector David Bowden and the land under the Stapylton workshop.

The Jim Beam deal was finalised early this week. "We've been saved by the skin of our teeth," Dick Johnson Racing team manager Steve Chalker says. "It's too early to say anything officially, but we've done a deal that guarantees we will be on the grid next year. We're not in a position to do anything just yet, but early in the New Year we plan to have an official launch."

Johnson's rebuilding plans includes a technical tie-up with Ford's top team Triple Eight Race Engineering, which is also Queensland-based. The Johnson Falcons driven by Steve Johnson and Will Davison are already being updated at Triple Eight.

While the way is now clear for Perkins to field two cars again next year, he is confirming only that Shane Price will replace Paul Dumbrell, who has moved to the Supercheap team in place of Greg Murphy, who has gone to Tasman. Perkins says he's reviewing a list of candidates, including his son Jack, to replace Steven Richards, who will switch to Ford Performance Racing in the new year as FPR loses Jason Bright to his own team, Britek. Perkins says the decision facing him "is not stressing me at all".

The proponents of a Townsville race, headed by prominent car dealer and V8 steering committee chairman Tony Ireland and Townsville Enterprise chairman Geoff Plante, want explanations on how the government arrived at its conclusion. They say that, if all cards are laid out on the table, they can then reshape the proposal if necessary, and may seek a Federal Government contribution to getting the race up.

The meeting with Sports Minister Fraser was initially set for December 27 in Brisbane, but has been brought forward and will be held on home ground for the Townsville lobby, who claim the city is disadvantaged by being a Labor stronghold and that the Beattie Labor Government therefore is not inclined to offer it any electoral sweeteners. They question why the Gold Coast Indy and V8 carnival gets substantial government underwriting and other Queensland areas get preferential treatment on other projects.

The government says a Townsville street race would require $24.7 million in initial capital works, with the Townsville City Council and the government then having to contribute $3 million a year each. The original proposal from Townsville in 2004 estimated that an $11 million capital injection from the government would be enough.

Premier Peter Beattie has been quoted as saying since the government's rejection on December 5 that he could not see any problems with releasing its analysis for public scrutiny, but bureaucrats have since declined to make the report public on the grounds it is a cabinet document containing commercially sensitive information. The Townsville consortium says Minister Fraser is now hinting he's prepared to discuss possible ways of refining the concept, on which $850,000 has already been spent, so that the race can be supported.

Green light for Hamilton '08
It's all-clear for the new New Zealand street race at Hamilton for seven years from April 2008. Resource consent has been confirmed this week, with the deadline for appeals passing without any objections being lodged with the Environment Court. The race will be held on a 3.5km track bordering the central business district of NZ's biggest inland city, about an hour's drive south of Auckland.

Pukekohe, the permanent circuit 40km south of Auckland, will stage its final V8 Supercar round next April. Hamilton secured the race long-term after failures to get resource consent in Auckland or Wellington. Hamilton ratepayers will cough up NZ$7 million for the circuit to be built and many more millions have been set aside under a "long term community plan" to cover "sponsorship".

The exact figure is unclear due to "commercial sensitivities", but it has been reported it could be as much as NZ$25 million over seven years.

Winterbottom finished third in this year's V8 Supercar Championship with FPR. Ross Stone says SBR is committed to bringing young drivers through the ranks and a return to the Fujitsu series is a good fit. SBR hopes to run two Fujitsu cars in 2008.

The team, originally Bettenhausen Racing, will take delivery of its first two Panoz DP01 cars today and the first Champ Car test will be at Sebring in Florida on January 23-25. Stoddart says the team hopes to have two drivers finalised a week before then and probably will still be negotiating with a third. There is an outside chance of a fourth entry.

Even with three CTE-HVM entries, it will mean about a quarter of the 2007 Champ Car field will have Australian connections, with Craig Gore's Team Australia having two (including Will Power) on a grid that is likely to boast 22 to 24 at most.

Names in the CTE-HVM mix are Jos Verstappen, the veteran Dutchman who has had a long association with Stoddart and drove for him in Formula One; another Dutchman, Robert Doornbos; Englishman Justin Wilson, who raced for Stoddart in F1 and has been with RuSPORT in Champ Car; woman racer Katherine Legge; and the team's 2006 drivers, Nelson Philippe (this year's Gold Coast winner and fourth in the series) and Dan Clarke.

Aussie Ryan Briscoe does not appear to be in calculations anywhere in the Champ Car scene, with indications now he may concentrate on sportscar racing in a Porsche once the A1 Grand Prix series ends.

Interestingly, there is so far only one American driver -- rookie Alex Figge -- confirmed for Champ Car, although Bobby Rahal's son, Graham, is a likely second starter. The '07 series will run only on road and street circuits, with all its oval and superspeedway rounds gone while the rival Indy Racing League now has races at all four types of tracks. And it is now 10 years since Jimmy Vasser became Champ Car's last American champion.

Englishman Keith Wiggins, who ran the Pacific team in F1 in the 1990s, will continue running CTE Racing-HVM from its Indianapolis base. Dutch property developer Harry Muermans, a Stoddart associate in F1, has invested in the team, with the ownership deal brokered by the Champ Car series' Australian co-owner, Kevin Kalkhoven.

Under Stoddart's ownership the outfit will be known as Team Minardi USA. He says it's "a good time" to be entering Champ Car, with the introduction of the Panoz chassis which will be "a leveling of the playing field". He says he's going in with high expectations "but a dash of reality thrown in".

"Champ Car has a tremendously exciting future -- it is viewed as being very credible, very respectable and very well managed," says Stoddart, who sold his Minardi F1 team to Red Bull a year ago. He claims another F1 team boss is eyeing a move to Champ Car.

Of his own new operation, Stoddart says: "Keith will be remaining in charge of the day-to-day aspect and management. What I bring to it will be resource, and also probably a little bit of street wisdom that I've acquired over the years. I don't see it as Keith working for me; I see it as us working together."

Purnell founded electronics business Pi Research, which was bought by Ford in 1999. Through that deal Purnell was made head of Ford's Premiere Performance Division, which included its F1 activity with Jaguar Racing. In his new FIA role he will have responsibility for developing F1 technologies relevant to road cars as well as trying improve racing.

Italian Gianluigi Galli, in a Peugeot 307, won the event for the second year, ahead of Finn Toni Gardemeister in a Citroen Xsara. Galli won three parts and Gardemeister the other. Atkinson had a battle to beat 20-year-old Simone Campedelli, who was driving a Skoda Fabia world rally car for the first time.