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As regular readers will recall, I appear to be at odds with the Supercars management, specifically its chairman, over the issue of racing outside Australia/New Zealand.
Let me explain why I am highly sceptical about overseas venues.
Any event, whether here or abroad, that is brought into the Supercars calendar should be financially sustainable. An event needs to stack up financially for the promoter, for Supercars and for the teams. Otherwise, it won’t last.
History has proven that standalone Supercars events overseas simply haven’t worked. If they did, then they’d still be happening. It’s as simple as that. We have had standalone races in China, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and the United States over the years. Not one was viable. Supercars and the teams did make some money on some (not all) of these, but the promoters didn’t and therefore they disappeared faster than a beer in Darwin.
The real, core, reason that these events didn’t work was that nobody went to them. Empty grandstands meant that the respective promoters had zero chance of recouping their investments. Plus, who honestly wants to perform without an audience at this level? Certainly, there won’t be many sponsors who’d be excited.
There simply wasn’t any local interest in what is a highly parochial category designed, to its credit, for Australian (and NZ) consumers. Some folks will argue that the NRL did a sterling job in Las Vegas this year with their opening matches. That’s true. But a large part of that success was because so many Aussies, expat and home based, went to Vegas to watch. Is NRL sustainable in Vegas (or anywhere in the US) year upon year if the fans from here don’t travel? I don’t believe so for a moment. There’s too much competition and they don’t need another ball category. If the world’s biggest game, soccer, struggles here at a professional level, then what hope has a tiny (on a world scale) ball sport such as NRL got in the USA? None.
But, if those Aussies do travel each year to Sin City, then the NRL adventure could be sustainable. And therein lies the key for Supercars, which I’ll return to.
Okay, so how about this notion that Supercars could run on a Formula 1 race card somewhere other than Albert Park? We’ve done that before, in Abu Dhabi 2012. After one day of practice, it was clear we wouldn’t be going back any time soon after leading F1 drivers complained that we were putting too many tyre marks on the kerbs making it difficult for them to see them clearly. I kid you not.
These days, would Supercars add anything of real value to an F1 event for a promoter? Given that F2 and F3 plus Carrera Cup all feature on many of the race cards these days, it’s hard to see why any more support categories are needed. Singapore has always had potential for Supercars purely because it could be a venue that Aussies would travel to and therefore add value to. Furthermore, F2 and F3 don’t go there at the moment.
However, there are two massive drawbacks for Supercars if they were to compete there.
Firstly, the expense of staying in Singapore over the F1 weekend is far beyond the reach of the average Supercars fan. Hotel costs, for instance, are through the roof when F1 is in town. There’s the possibility of staying over the causeway in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, but that would entail a trek back and forth each day that would take the fun out of the trip.
The other drawback is that any Supercars track time would be highly limited (even more so than in Melbourne) and it would take place in the heat of the afternoon with no one watching. Mad dogs and Englishmen might go out in the midday sun, but no-one else does in Singapore. Add in the limitations of paddock positioning and zero access to pit lane (the reason why F2 isn’t there), and the cons outweigh the pros by a long way.
As for Qatar, an F1 venue that’s been pushed apparently, that would add nothing to the Supercars Championship as previously discussed.
Which all leads me to the possibility that there just might be a venue much closer to home that could work…
Given that a viable overseas event needs Aussies to travel there in some numbers, needs Supercars to be the primary category on the race card, and needs to be in a time zone that works for television in Australia, the options are limited.
It would also be extremely helpful if any such venue could be accessed by sea so as to limit the cost of transport.
The answer just could be the Mandalika International Circuit on the island of Lombok. Those of you who follow MotoGP will know the track as the bikes race there each year.
Lombok lies next to Bali in the Indonesian archipelago, which is the single biggest destination for Australians travelling overseas these days. It’s a tourist mecca in its own right and would be highly accessible for Supercars fans from both cost and also travel time perspectives.
Sitting in the same time zone as Perth, there’s no reason why the television broadcast couldn’t be maximised for home audiences.
There’s also surely an opportunity to add a visit to Lombok into the calendar as part of the swing north in the winter months when racing in the southern half of Australia is suboptimal. Other potential overseas venue dates fall into either the autumn or the spring when the calendar is already full if all our local tracks are included.
A season that went from Perth in the autumn to Darwin, Lombok, Townsville and Queensland Raceway through the winter months could make a lot of sense. Proper organisation would mean that team trucks wouldn’t have to venture back to base throughout that period. They’d return pre-enduro season to test and prepare for Sandown/The Bend.
Now, the challenge would be for Bill Gibson and his crew at Gibson Freight to come up with the best and most economical way of transporting the circus to the Mandalika circuit. Air or Sea? Is there a way of containerising the show (as needs to happen for New Zealand anyway) and sea freighting out of Darwin across to Indonesia? Then back to Darwin or Townsville? Could they even charter a car ferry and send the transporters over? After all, Lombok is a lot closer, by sea, to Darwin than Melbourne is to Auckland!
The downside of a race at a place like Mandalika is that the Supercars hierarchy, (a) won’t have ever heard of it and, (b) wouldn’t be able to pose around in the F1 paddock quaffing champagne of course… but it would be fun for the rest of us who like sun, sea, sand and real racing.
Unfortunately, and landing back on earth with a thump, there’s also clearly a massive issue to address on home soil with crowd numbers at some venues judging by Perth and Darwin. Perhaps it would be as well to get on top of that first.
