V8s in danger of killing the golden goose
This weekend begins what shapes to be the greatest season in V8 history. The first year of a mega dollar television deal, putting the sport in the big leagues. Not only mega dollars, but mega exposure. Channel Seven’s all-day-Saturday-all-day-Sunday-except-for-AFL-days-when-it-becomes-half-day-Sunday broadcasts will give the sponsors involved the sort of prolonged coverage they otherwise couldn’t buy on TV.
Well, except for those delightful infomercials (Did you know there’s now an entire channel on pay television dedicated to half hour commercials? People with free-to-air only are stuck for options late at night, but who in their right mind would choose to watch Vanessa Williams’ brother talk about his acne? I digress).
The sport has come a long way relatively quickly. It wasn’t that many years ago that Seven would only run an hour long highlights package on a Sunday afternoon or late at night (then under the arcane name of ‘The Australian Touring Car Championship’), with a near empty Oran Park barely breathing. Dark Days. Today we have the prospect of three hundred thousand people turning up at a weekend, notably the upcoming Adelaide event. Quite the phenomenon.
Now one of the team owners, Garry Rogers, wants to get two teams chucked out. Something to do with one guy having a piece of two separate Holden outfits. Rogers is probably right, but who the hell cares? I tried to read an article on this saga but got bored after two paragraphs. All I know is it threatens to remove those teams involved. One of them is HRT. Ask a casual fan, the type that V8s have been chasing so feverously over the last decade, to name an individual team. For a large portion, HRT would be the only one they’d know. And HRT could get the chop? Because of some legality that has no impact on whether their cars go any faster?? Crazy. You know what’s crazier? Rogers is also a Holden man.
There are reasons why this sport took off when so many others fell over. When a bit of theatre presents itself, all and sundry milk it for all its worth. Their drivers are the most accessible athletes in the sports industry. They worked out that Holden versus Ford is the easiest rivalry in sport to understand. It can go on forever and a fan doesn’t need to appreciate the workings of camshaft to get it.
Everyone of these people has hit the jackpot. Everyone can play nice and share merrily in the loot, or, they can muck this up by cannibalising each other in the sort of politicking and infighting that can turn any fan off. Just leave it to the blokes in the cars to shove each other.
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