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It is an enticing possibility, following the announcement that an international investor has bought into Supercars parent RACE (Racing Australia Consolidated Enterprises Ltd) through the purchase of the approximately 15 percent share which Garry and Barry Rogers had owned.
Said investor is Walcott LLC, a name which means very little until one starts to peel back the layers.
Walcott LLC is thought to be an investment company of Brian Learst, the founder and, until relatively recently, CEO of QuintEvents.
QuintEvents was bought in January by Liberty Media, a name which does mean quite something to the motorsport industry given it is the owner of Formula 1, among other sport and entertainment properties.
While that explains Walcott’s “links to Liberty Media,” per Supercars’ statement advising of the purchase, Learst is believed to no longer have an ongoing involvement in QuintEvents.
Be that as it may, it is nevertheless an exciting development for Supercars, and the reason is in the name: ‘Events’.
Supercars’ new mantra, according to Chief Operating Officer Tim Watsford, is “bigger, better, more,” and it is a message he was keen to deliver when he spoke to Speedcafe during the Bathurst SuperFest.
“We want to do more, we want to go bigger – I think that’s a desire from the board, Shane [Howard] our CEO, and the executive team, to look at the future of what that category is, from a major event perspective – and we want to be major,” said Watsford.
What better time than now, then, to bring someone like Learst into the ownership group of the Supercars Championship?
Learst founded QuintEvents in 2002 and was its CEO until the end of 2022 (after which he became Executive Chairman), with the company valued at USD 313 million (AUD 480 million at time of writing*) under the sale to Liberty a year later.
It has been the company behind ‘F1 Experiences’ since the programme’s inception in 2017, and also operates the two-wheel equivalent, ‘MotoGP Premier’.
The Charlotte-based business is furthermore the ‘Official Travel and Experience Package’ provider for the NASCAR Chicago Street Race and the Clash at the Coliseum, with other partnerships including Tennis Australia as the Australian Open’s ‘International Experiences Provider’, NBA Experiences, and big horse racing meetings in the United States.
Granted, these are more corporate-focused products which are a subset of the overall event offering, but the point is that Learst is a professional with pedigree in the biggest of big events and it would seem to speak volumes that he built a business which Liberty Media – the company which made F1 ‘cool’ – saw fit to buy.
As F1 did then, Supercars could do with an injection of fanfare now, and the time is right.
Gen3 is now into its second year, meaning not only has the novelty of the new cars started to wear off, but so too is the category ticking off important items such as aerodynamic parity (thanks to off-season wind tunnel testing) and engine parity (with transient dynamometer testing on the horizon).
With Gen3 close to being ‘sorted’, at least substantially so, there comes the prospect of Supercars management dedicating more time and resources to pumping up the show.
Not every event can be an Adelaide or a Gold Coast, and the latter has unique marketing advantages given a Supercars office, three teams (and another up the road in Brisbane), and so many drivers are based there.
However, several more Adelaide- or Gold Coast-style events would be nice.
Notably, indications are that Barclay Nettlefold, Chairman of the RACE and Supercars boards, may well have been instrumental in bringing Learst onboard.
Along with Supercars CEO Shane Howard, Nettlefold is the public face of the business, and was last year spruiking the prospect of expanding the calendar to 15 events as soon as this year.
Needless to say, that did not come to pass, with the return of New Zealand and the fiasco that was the Newcastle 500 thought to have soaked up time on putting the calendar together.
Nevertheless, Nettlefold thinks big – unrealistically so at times, according to critics – but he is cognisant of the need to make Supercars a box office entertainment offering.
Learst – and the network which he would bring to the table – might just be the perfect fit, while also untangling Supercars from a messy relationship with the Australian Racing Group, of which Barry Rogers is the majority shareholder.
The Rogers have expressed their frustration that the so-called ‘whole of motorsport’ approach never came to pass, although how much value ARG would have brought to the table as compared to how much it stood to benefit from the goodwill of the Supercars brand, and how much it might have cost by displacing some of Supercars’ regular support categories, are now but hypotheticals.
It is also interesting to ponder how and why the 2023 double-booking of the Sandown 500 and an ARG event at the Melbourne circuit occurred, at a time when party/ies connected to ARG sat on the Supercars Board and hence had knowledge of its tentative booking before the SpeedSeries calendar was announced.
Learst, on the other hand, does not have the stigma – fairly or otherwise – of being a conflicted shareholder, and the possibilities his involvement raises are exciting.
Is he the key to bigger, better, more? We are going to find out.
* Exchange rate AUD 1 = USD 0.6522
