racer69 wrote:
What about the organisers of the race meetings who have planned all year around the Sandown or Winton event, having categories pull out abit over a month out for a blow-in race meeting organised at the last minute?
Where would replacement events say for the Historic Sandown come from? And anyway bar the Biante Series (which is the star attraction for the Historic Sandown meeting), sponsors are not a problem in historic racing.
Categories at Winton that weekend are less of an issue as it is a AASA-sanctioned meeting
And how big of a crowd are they really expecting. The black wiggle stated publically the event is only being put on the appease Channel 7, not the fans, and if they couldn't draw a crowd to the 500, why would a 300km meeting two months after attract anymore?
Another question should be levelled at CAMS, allowing a late-notice event to come in and just take over?
Costs goes up in terms of status, how much TV coverage you want etc etc... hence why the likes of ARC left the program, why Biante has very little TV coverage etc..
I don't think the circuits are going to disappear overnight just because an event is moved elsewhere to where it's originally scheduled. It's really up to the organisers of the series whether they want to say "Right, let's go to Phillip Island instead." I can't speculate on the historic series because I'm not fully aware of their plans. But I would be very surprised if there is little (or heaven forbid, none whatsoever) support races for the weekend.
I'm equally concerned about the crowd figures, which is why I'm hesitant to fast-track my own plans for the sake of one obscure race meeting. Although if I had everything in place now or if circumstances change, I'd do it. The crowd figures won't be world record breaking, but it would still be an acceptable level of on-track exposure if I had a team there. Given that it's held in the spring, the football season's over, I wouldn't expect tumbleweed floating around the paddock. Even if the crowd figures are unexpectedly smaller than usual, it'll certainly be more than most club/state events. I'm not taking anything away from club/state events, but V8 Supercars is just inherently bigger in terms of awareness, involvement, investment and marketing. Even so, I do hope this round is a bit of a flop (at least by local V8 Supercar round standards and turnout) so it serves as a bit of a wake up call for the series to get its act together and smarten up the series.
It's not really a CAMS issue as to the last minute addition to the event, you'd want to berate the V8 Supercar organising group for that one. They needed to replace Bahrain at the last minute, sponsors would expect as much exposure as possible throughout the season and losing an entire event's worth of exposure would irk quite a few people armed with those magical chequebooks. It's really the best of a bad situation, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. V8 Supercars loves to harp on about how it's such a world-class series and we're the greatest racing series on the face of the universe. This is part of the reason why I'm not overly keen on the series personally, to tell you the truth, I think it's run by people who do nothing but pat each other on the back saying how good they are, massaging egos and blind to any of the faults and rough edges around the series. But that's just my opinion, and I know others won't agree to it.
Having said that, I don't underestimate the reach V8 Supercars has to a wide audience - it's the closest form of motorsport (apart from F1) to mainstream society in this country. Although I can perfectly understand why certain series like the ARC had a problem with the way they were managed and treated. But that's an entirely different topic.
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