The success of Shane Van Gisbergen in the NASCAR second tier Xfinity Series success has come as no surprise to anyone in Australia or New Zealand. His 14 year rise through Supercars was such that when Triple Eight Engineering needed a replacement for the aging Craig Lowndes, he was an obvious and amazing fit. What followed was a multi-year battle between him and Scott MacLaughlin at Dick Johnson Racing and when MacLaughlin left to join Roger Penske's Indycar team, Shane was more or less left at the top of the hill in Australian motorsport with no equal. He won three Championships and three Bathurst 1000's which by my crude index system, puts him in the top ten of all touring car drivers in Australian motorsport history.
But the fact that he left to go and race in a NASCAR street race (which he won) and then liked that so much that he decided to quit the Supercars series entirely, in favour of his American dreams in NASCAR, serves to highlight that Australian motorsport is kind of broken, that the pathways through Australian motorsport are kind of broken, and that Supercars in particular is also broken.
Let me explain the motorsport landscape in Australia. The top tier of Australian motorsport is unashamedly and unassailably Supercars. There are then second level series such as Super 2 and Super 3, TransAm, and TCR, and there is a pretense that there is a pathway system to get to the top tier. The unspoken truth is that everyone in Australia knows that the pathway is deliberately designed to be inherently broken, that the Supercars series is a closed shop, and that there really is no opportunity for any new players unless they buy one of the existing franchises. Generally speaking, one does not get to drive in Supercars unless you have driven for a Super 2 team and/or come from an international series which is so prestigious that Supercars' management will give you a free pass. Someone like Max Verstappen, or Kyle Busch would absolutely be given a free pass to drive in Supercars but someone like Ash Sutton as BTCC Champion might not. Note that I have not mentioned Formula cars here. Any driver who wants to seriously go Formula racing, must leave Australia and do Formula 4 or Formula 3 in England. That's it. Australia is simply a waste of time in that regard.
As for the actual Supercars themselves, they are the result of an evolutionary dead-end; which they kind of got to after twenty years of rolling inertia. After the death of the Australian motor industry and the subsequent end of sedans and big family cars, Ford wanted to push the Mustang rather than the Mondeo as their halo car and GM which really didn't care at all, released the IP for the shape of the Camaro. As it stands, instead of selling 6000 cars per month each, the Mustang is now selling less than 100 per month and the Camaro is discontinued which means that it sells 0 per month. Supercars management in a marketing push, is trying to chase some kind of nostalgia for a world which no longer exists, to attract fans that they refuse to cultivate, with cars that bear no relation to anything that anyone can buy; kind based upon the remnants of cars which no longer exist. As for what a Supercar actually is technically, it is a slightly worse GT3, which is made to a set of bespoke regulations which have been very much shaped by Ford and GM; which ensure that no other manufacturer will want to join.
Having run out of 5L V8 engines which were the backbone of Australian motorsport for half a century, the series then turned its attention to GM and Ford in the United States. Rather than buy in the 360cid engines which are ubiquitous in stock car racing in America, Supercars let Ford run its 5.0L Coyote V8 as found in the Mustang. As it is "impossible" to run a Balance of Performance between that and the 6.2L LS3 V8 in the Camaro, Supercars allowed GM to run an existing 350 Chev derivative and the result has been nothing short of boring. Despite half-hearted attempts to equalise the Mustang and the Camaro, the differences between the engines are so great and the differences between the shape to the rear ends of the two cars are such, that the Mustang basically stands no chance of winning at any high-speed circuit whatsoever.
Not only does the Supercars series have cars with advantages that are baked in and will not be resolved until Gen-4 (if that ever happens) because of the sunk cost fallacy, the management and funding model of the series is equally broken and myopic. Supercars by virtue of being the inheritor of what once was the Australian Touring Car Championship, now commands the lion's share of sponsorship dollars in Australia like never before. It would say that it has a symbiotic relationship with television royalties and even pundits in the industry will tell us time and time again that the only way to pay for all of this, is to have subscribers pay for it on Pay-TV as the old free-to-air model for television generally has broken down across the board.
While there might be quite a lot of truth in there, mixed in with the batch of dough is the hubris of Supercars management, and the fact that unlike Formula One, or the English Premier League, or Cricket, there is not a whole world of willing subscribers from whom you can extract subscription payments from. Supercars is after all only a domestic touring car/GT championship and its prime audience comes from Australia, with some residuals in New Zealand and maybe 1% in the rest of the world.
But rather than actually try to grow the pie as the BTCC have done by showing the series on ITV4, or NASCAR's brilliant decision to play entire races mid-week on their YouTube Channel, Supercars Management have basically tried to stand on the throat of motorsport fans in Australia and if it isn't subscription payments for Pay-TV, it is ticket prices that have increased massively in relation to the rate of inflation. Although they might claim that this is because they want to offer a better experience, the truth is that at many circuits around Australia, camping numbers have been restricted and the so-called improved experience involves exactly the same grandstands that were put up more than 30 years ago.
The net result of all of this, is that we now have a highly professional series, which together runs no more than about 27 cars at the very biggest race series, with an insensible pathway into the series unless they are already connected with an existing team, no real hope that any new manufacturer will want to play, and very little opportunity for the rest of the world to sent their best drivers to com play any more. The other net result is that the drivers in the series, are being pulled every harder to the bright lights of NASCAR, where they run cars which are semi-broadly similar and where their skills are transferrable.
The truth is that if you are an international motor car company, there's no reason to even look at Australian domestic motorsport. If you are a foreign GT3 team, you have the Bathurst 12 Hours to try and conquer; which means that you can ignore Supercars. If you are an international driver, the Bathurst 12 Hours with 3 drivers per car, offers ample opportunity to come and play; which also means that you can ignore Supercars. TransAm Australia buys in cars, as does TCR, with none of the development work done here; which makes sense as there is no domestic auto industry to speak of anyway.
In a sensible world, Supercars, Super 2 and Super 3, would all just admit that the whole premise of what used to be Supercars, died in 2016 with the end of the Falcon. Unlike the world which used to exist, nobody takes a car off the production line to go front line motor racing in Australia any more. TransAm with its way cheaper cars, could have and should have become the standard. They should have all come to a sensible agreement that while 27 cars for a top-level series is nice, the crown jewels of Australian motorsport have always been endurance racing which have included Sandown and Bathurst. Those events work well when they are very very very big. 27 cars is a joke. 56 cars is nice. The bigness of an event means that you actually do attract overseas drivers, give space for up-and-comers to display their wares, and give little teams at least a chance to play with the big boys.
If there had been a common set of cars, then costs would have gone down and they would not have been so precious about what happens to them on track. Instead we currently get infringements for minor bumping; which just seems daft. In deliberately choosing a bespoke car which is expensive to damage and which is so fragile that they can't go banging into each other, in choosing to close the shop so that very few people are allowed to play, and in choosing to extract every single dollar out of fans to the point where casual fans have basically been excluded, everything that made Supercars what is was is being eroded. That's fine, but it does not inspire the next generation nor grow the series.
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