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As we settle down into the motorsport season now, and look forward to the return of MotoGP which will hopefully provide relief from the soporific on-track spectacle of F1, I’ve gone through my scribblings of the last week and extracted some worthy of note.
Whilst researching the various online resources available to bring myself reasonably up to speed for the season opening MotoGP event in Qatar, I came across this George Orwell quotation in a typically well written piece by Mat Oxley; Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.
I couldn’t think of a better phrase than this to summarise so much of what is being said and published these days around Supercars and the Supercars Championship. People who call themselves journalists being shown to be nothing of the kind, and those who dare to seek, and publish, the truth being chastised for doing so. If all those who speak off the record and behind closed doors were to actually say what they think of the direction the series is taking at the moment, then change really would happen.
Anyway, moving on… and back to that first F1 Grand Prix of the year in Bahrain. It was a snoozefest unfortunately and, I suspect, much of the blame can be laid once again at having to manage tyre life to an extreme level on a very high-degradation surface. No one in F1 is allowed to criticise the tyres (including, it seems, all those journalists with permanent passes) but, behind closed doors, teams and drivers remain scathing in their assessment of them.
Tyre degradation, within limits, should be a part of racing in my opinion. Great drivers handle it better than others. But it shouldn’t be so great that drivers trundle around six (and more) seconds off the pace and don’t even attempt to race. Rather, they drive to a lap time and see where that takes them by the chequered flag. That’s certainly how it looked with Alonso at the weekend, for instance.
Hopefully F1 puts on a better show this weekend in Jeddah. If they don’t, then it may be reflected further in the very poor initial audience figures for the latest season (6) of Drive to Survive. It would appear that viewing is some 25 percent down compared with Season 5. For me, having watched all 10 of the latest episodes now, I’m not surprised, given that D to S has seemingly degenerated into a pure PR pitch. Almost every meeting and conversation is staged for the cameras and then the overly ‘cheesy’ interactions with families is painful to watch. No more Drive to Survive for me.
Conversely, NASCAR: Full Speed was, IMHO, excellent and I really enjoyed it. It also appears to have been a ratings success in North America, its primary catchment area of course. The lesson for D to S is surely that almost every television series has a lifespan. Doesn’t matter whether it’s The Sopranos or Yellowstone. F1 needs to find a different way of enhancing the product away from the actual racing.
But Bahrain wasn’t all bad. There was some great racing in the F2 and F3 supports, and none more notable for us than the F3 Feature Race performance of young Christian Mansell with a superb drive to second place. Christian had a shocker in the first, Sprint, race of the weekend which really put the pressure on him to perform in the Feature. And perform he did with a series of excellent passes in the early stages to take him from eighth to second. He pressured the winner, Luke Browning, all the way home. Luke is one of most highly regarded young British guns on the world stage this year and that’s further proof that Christian is operating at an elevated level. Next stop for F3 is Melbourne and an opportunity for us to cheer him on to home success.
The good news for this coming weekend is that, as I mentioned earlier, we have the return of MotoGP to our screens. For me, this is the greatest motorsport spectacle on earth. The switch by Mark Marquez from Honda to the Gresini Ducati team is the biggest story in the category since the, very unsuccessful, switch by Valentino Rossi from Yamaha to Ducati in 2011. This is only going to add spice, and eyeballs I suspect, to the show in Qatar. Marquez will be, like his team-mate brother, riding year-old machinery but that can sometimes be a positive as the bike was clearly fast and well sorted last year.
Besides Jack Miller in the main class, there’s also Senna Agius in Moto2 plus Joel Kelso and Jacob Roulstone in Moto3 representing Australia so there’s no excuse for not watching all three races. One thing is for sure; it’s very rare that a MotoGP event doesn’t deliver at least one great race over a weekend. With the Sprint Race format, there are four opportunities each time. I’m still not convinced that the Sprint Race format is great for MotoGP in the long run, but there’s no doubting the intensity of the racing it often showed last year.
READ MORE: Roland’s View: I’m no fan of the biggest change in MotoGP history
In other news, it’s now just over a week until the Adelaide Motorsport Festival returns to Victoria Park. This event is as close as we get to the Goodwood Festival of Speed in Australia and last year demonstrated how much fun it can be to bring a few hundred interesting cars to the parklands near the Adelaide CBD. There’s a huge mixture of race cars and exotica laid on this year along with stars such as Valtteri Bottas, Liam Lawson, Damon Hill, Alister McRae, Chris Vermeulen, and Kevin Magee. And a certain Craig Lowndes!
I can’t wait to get there and hopefully turn a few laps in my ‘67 Camaro and my ex-Possum Bourne Subaru Impreza Group A rally car. If you’re in the precinct, please come and say hello.
