Under Motorsport Australia’s plans, a 150-hectare site near Avalon Airport, which services Melbourne, would be turned into a state-of-the-art facility with the potential for hosting disciplines including speedway and drag racing in addition to an FIA Grade 1/FIM Grade A circuit.
A $1.6 million Victorian Government grant has already been made for the purpose of design and planning, but Vohra has identified securing full funding and even starting on construction works this year as the aim.
He told the KTM Summer Grill, “I think the big deliverable for us in the next 12 months is to see if we can actually land the funding for the Home of Motorsport and actually move to a construction phase.
“I’d love to be sitting here in 12 months’ time talking about how that’s going and how much we’re looking forward to the layout of the circuit, what sort of categories will run there, what sort of timings we’re looking at standing this up, and actually being live to the sport.”
Access to facilities has long been a concern for Australian motorsport, highlighted in more recent times by moves to rezone Sandown for residential development and the saga over Wakefield Park – now known as ‘One Raceway’ and set to reopen this year.
It also forms a key plank of Motorsport Australia’s 2023-25 Strategic Plan and, while that document was released before Vohra was appointed CEO, he too is pushing hard for the Home of Motorsport.
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According to Vohra, the Avalon ‘super circuit’ itself, and Motorsport Australia control over the facility are key objectives, to maximise value for the industry and governments.
That includes being able to use the Home of Motorsport for educational purposes, including STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), in order to return a dividend to the community.
“Implicit within our strategic plan is being able to land a template around facilities that have some greater level of ownership and control,” he noted.
“The key part of that in the strategic plan for Motorsport Australia is for the Home of Motorsport, [which is] a key initiative for us to drive through into the end of [2023] and into January [2024] around feasibility, going then into the Victorian state government treasury process around the business case that says, if the government was to invest a certain amount of money, we’d be able to build dedicated track facilities that could cater for a number of different disciplines and those facilities would be controlled and managed by Motorsport Australia, rather than a private operator.
“Because currently, if we go to look to deploy motorsport at a circuit, it’s generally privately held, there needs to be significant fees paid in order to do that, and we only have limited access often in terms of how we can do that.
“Whereas, with a dedicated Home of Motorsport, if we can stand that up, if we can build that, it gives us multiple options about how to run different events there.
“There’s different categories of events, but also we can bring a number of capabilities to that facility like being able to run STEM-related subject training and educational activities, potential for university and higher education to be based at the facility, for us to do a lot of early learning training and licence training…
“There’s a number of different things that we can bring to a facility that we have control over.
“If we are successful in doing that, it also gives us a template to engage with councils and governments at state and local levels to go, ‘Here’s what we can do, here’s the benefits to the local community, to the sport overall, to participation,’ for it to be seen as one of these key infrastructure and architectural investment in growing communities, not just a cost for a sport that doesn’t necessarily translate to benefits.
“I think we’ve got to be smarter than that, we’ve got to be able to articulate the benefit because we know there is a substantial economic benefit to this type of investment.”
For more from Sunil Vohra, check out the full episode of the KTM Summer Grill.
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