MOTORSPORT: World's biggest weekend of racing

Daniel Ricciardo reckons Red Bull Racing is a chance of toppling Mercedes on the streets of Monaco on Sunday night, Australian time. And three Aussies are in the Indianapolis 500 early Monday, Australian time (Will Power starting third, James Davison 28th and Ryan Briscoe 30th in the field of 33). Meantime, grandson of late Sir Jack, Matthew Brabham is third on the grid for the 100-mile (160km) Indy Lights race on The Brickyard oval tomorrow morning, Australian time.

NASCAR’s Charlotte 600 night race will follow the Indy 500 within hours. This is the second biggest race in the Sprint Cup, in which Aussie Marcos Ambrose is 19th in the points, with a television audience now bigger than the Indy 500 but still behind that of the season-opening Daytona 500.

The World RX goes to the roots of the sport at Lydden Hill in British country Kent, with charismatic Norewegian former world rally champion Petter Solberg leading in a Citroen DS3 and ex-F1 racer Nelson Piquet Junior competing in a Ford Fiesta (albeit in the Lites category but with experience from the American-based Global Rallycross Championship).

But, since it’s on home soil, let’s turn to the first all-endurance Shannons Australian Motor Racing Nationals event at Phillip Island.

Yet the lightweight Radical Australia Cup sports cars will be the fastest cars on the seaside circuit in three 40-minute races.

Lots of name drivers are taking part at the Island, many of them in two categories. For example, Garth Tander will share Tony Quinn’s Aston Martin in the 27-car GT field.

Among the drivers in the Porsches will be Tander's fellow V8 Supercar racers Jason Bright, David Reynolds and Nick Percat and New Zealand’s man of the moment, Scott McLaughlin, as well as fellow Kiwis Jonny Reid and Daniel Gaunt. And Carrera Cup regulars Craig Baird and Steven Richards and Warren Luff. And triple superbike world champion Troy Bayliss will be on-track – he'll share a Porsche 991 GT3 Cup car with Michael Patrizi.

Betty Klimenko’s Erebus outfit will field young guns Richard Muscat and Jack LeBrocq in a Mercedes SLS AMG in the GT Championship enduro, while Glenn Seton and Bob Pearson head the AMChamp field in a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X. The manufacturer battle for outright honours in that category is between Mitsubishi and BMW.

John Bowe will share a Ferrari 458 GT3 in the GT event and a BMW 335i turbo in AMChamp Great Southern Four-Hour.

It’s a great line-up and becoming seriously good alternative viewing to V8 Supercars, although it doesn’t have the same exposure.

The Nationals promotional department, as promoters as inclined to do, got a little ahead of itself in saying that a couple of drivers could cover nearly 1100km over two days “nicely mirroring racing’s most famous ‘double’ in the United States the same weekend”. Except that American oval racer Kurt Busch, entered for both the Indy 500 and the Charlotte 600, will have to take a rushed flight of almost 700km between the two, without the benefit of a night’s sleep between them races.

All the same, these Nationals are a coming thing in Australian motorsport and the entire Phillip Island meeting will be streamed live and free on Nationals TV at thenationals.com.au.

Martin in at Le Mans, Formula E going to Long Beach, RoC gives up on Thailand
Just before returning to F1 and the Indy 500, a few other snippets.

Queenslander John Martin’s sports car career had been derailed this year by a budgetary shortfall at the team for which he was to have contested the whole World Endurance Championship, but he is a late entry for his third start in the Le Mans 24-Hour in an ORECA Nissan LMP2 car.  

Formula E, the new all-electric open-wheeler world championship starting in September, will have a second American round on the Long Beach street circuit in California next April, three weeks after the other American round at Miami – and two weeks before the annual IndyCar event at Long Beach.

The Formula E races there will be on a shortened version of the track that once hosted F1 – and has been touted as a possible venue in the F1 world championship again within a few years.

The 10-round Formula E championship will start in Beijing in mid-September.

The International Race of Champions (RoC), which was an end-of-year feature at various venues for a quarter of a century, was cancelled last December in Thailand – and hopes of running it there late this year have been scotched this week by the continued unrest and military coup in the country.

Organisers of the RoC, which brings together stars from many different forms of motorsport in a variety of equal machinery, says they will have news of another venue “in the near future”.

World rallying authorities have been meeting this week to try to formulate regulations for 2017 in an effort to lure new manufacturer participation, particularly from Toyota.

And organisers of the Australasian Safari announced a new route for that event in Western Australia in September, leaving Perth on Friday, September 19, and taking in (over seven days of competition) the state’s Coral Coast, the Golden Outback and the North-West. Details at australasiansafari.com.au.

Australia’s Daniel Ricciardo in his Red Bull-Renault came closest to the mighty Mercedes’ of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg in Thursday’s first session.

It rained before the second 90-minute session and there was little action until the end, when Fernando Alonso’s Ferrari headed Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel’s Red Bull, with Ricciardo ninth. However, the times were meaningless.

Ricciardo, a two-time winner in Monaco in the junior formula World Series by Renault, has been confident this week that “we [Red Bull] will give them [Mercedes] a run” in Sunday’s sixth round of the world championship.

“I think if it is going to be anywhere this is the place for it.”

Beating the Mercs, winners of all five GPs so far in the new hybrid era, will need one of two things – outqualifying them or a miracle. Perhaps both.

The Monaco GP has not been won from lower than third on the grid in the past 17 years, with the pole-position starter victorious in nine of the past 10 – including the past five. Torque and wheelspin are bigger factors this year on the tight 3.34km circuit.

“The [new] cars are heavier, so braking distances are a little bit different,” said Hamilton, who is leading the championship after winning four races straight.

“The new braking system we have – the brake by wire – is more efficient and we have more power, so it’s a different beast we’re trying to throw around.”

Brazilian Felipe Massa, now with the Williams team after years with Ferrari (but being overshadowed by young Finnish teammate, Valterri Bottas), said the torque of the latest cars “maybe double what we had last year – and the grip from the tyre is not very high”.

“We drive the car a lot more sideways. Monaco will be a very easy race to crash… The toughest race of the season. Very, very difficult,” Massa said.

Renault already has been whipped by Mercedes in the engine battle this year and faces even more headaches, with drivers of some Renault-powered cars already close to incurring grid penalties for using too many power units. The maximum allowed for each driver for the season is five without penalty, but Red Bull’s four-time world champion Vettel already has used four.

Meanwhile, Red Bull’s brilliant technical director Adrian Newey has dismissed talk of an imminent move to Ferrari.

It is believed Newey is contracted to Red Bull until 2017.

Tensions appear to be rising within Ferrari as Alonso grows increasingly impatient at not having a truly competitive car for years now and yet to see any great progress under new team principal, Marco Mattiacci.

Ferarri president Luca Di Montezemolo has tried to calm the Spanish two-time world champion by flattering him with the comment that “Fernando is the best driver in the world, who always gives 200 per cent in the races”.

That came after Alonso pointedly remarked on glowing praise from Mercedes corporate chief Dieter Zetsche that it was “sometimes strange to see good comments and compliments from people from outside, and from the side that is supposed to be close to you there are the opposite comments”.

Di Montezemolo admitted that Alonso and teammate Kimi Raikkonen both “need a competitive Ferrari and that is our sole objective”.

F1 commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone’s criminal trial in Germany over paying jailed banker Gerhard Gribkowsky US$44 million eight years, alleged to have been a bribe, was postponed this week because 83-year-old Ecclestone had a heavy cold. However, Ecclestone said he intended to be at Monaco for the weekend.

Gribkowsky’s evidence last week contained major contradictions. He claimed Ecclestone had put a suitcase containing $20 million on a table in front of him in a motorhome at the 2005 Australian GP in Melbourne.

Two errors there: F1 motorhomes are only taken to European GPs, and Ecclestone did not attend the 2005 race in Melbourne.

Andretti, who still turns laps of the famous oval driving the Indy Racing Experience’s two-seater with passengers, told his team owner son Michael and Hinchcliffe’s sponsors of his desire.

“Dad was feeling me out and I was like, ‘No, that’s not happening’,” Michael Andretti said.

“He said he could probably put the car in the show [qualify it], but he didn’t know about racing it.

“He’s probably right – I think he could qualify the car. But we weren’t going to find out.”

Hinchcliffe returned to the cockpit in time to qualify second to polesitter Ed Carpenter and just ahead of Aussie Will Power, who is on the outside of the front row of the grid.

Power is leading the IndyCar series but has never finished better than fifth in the Indy 500 and he said this week: “It’s become even harder to win.

“You have to be able to run close and run in traffic well, which is very difficult. And there isn’t a car out there that can’t win it,” Power stated.