Off-season blues

Remember when AVESCO (as is was known then) told the world that they were making a concerted effort to place V8 Supercars into the mainstream media and have the sport placed amongst the "heavy hitters" of Australian sport such as AFL, cricket, NRL and Super 14?

Now the gap between Sunday, November 27, 2005 (Sunday, Phillip Island, Rd 13) and Friday, March 24, 2006 (Friday, Adelaide, Rd.1) is very long, exactly 116 days or more than three and a half months. That’s an eternity in sports, and has the sport been in the mainstream media much in that period of time? Not really. Sure there are the usual sponsor launches and team announcements that usually kick off around mid-January and go until about the end of February. But has there been much news or marketing come from the world headquarters of V8 Supercars Australia? Even www.v8supercars.com didn’t see much action in late December and early to mid-January.

Sure there isn’t much going on "on-track" during this period of time, but what was being done to ensure that the sport was kept in the media by its own administration? Surely the task cannot be left solely to the team spin doctors and media outlets to come up with ideas and gimmicks to keep their individual teams and drivers in to spotlight, all for their sponsors benefit of course.

We do have the 2006 Season Launch on March 4, but that will be held in Brisbane and, really, what national coverage will that really get other than a story on Channel Ten’s Sports Tonight? Also, most of the teams will have already launched their 2006 seasons individually – for them it’s too long to wait until early March, so the main attraction of seeing the 2006 liveries and drivers novelty will have passed. We are told that the season launch is about getting the fans close to the cars and drivers. But at the end of the day, I’m pretty sure those same fans would prefer to see the cars on the track rather than sitting idle doing nothing.

In 1999 there was an official pre-season test held at Eastern Creek about a month prior to the season beginning. There were quite a large amount of people there (even for Eastern Creek!). Why haven’t we revisited the idea? If the teams are all made to travel to Brisbane, why not hold the series launch at Queensland Raceway and have an official test day as well? Better yet, why not hold it in Sydney and do it at Oran Park (always gets a great crowd, anyhow) in mid-February. AVESCO could even sell tickets to the day (no more that $10 per head, special family packages and kids under 15 free) have hot-laps competitions and maybe make a bit of money out of it (to go to charity, naturally).

Everyone goes home happy. The fans see the cars on track in their new paint schemes. The teams get to test at a track that they normally wouldn’t get to. The media gets motion and action photos for the news stories and I’m sure that’s more likely to get some coverage than the cars sitting still at Southbank in Brisbane. And AVESCO gets the added media coverage and at the same time looks like the great corporate citizen by donating the proceeds to a worthy charity.

Maybe it’s time for V8 Supercars Australia’s media onslaught to actually happen rather than just being talked about because AFL, NRL, Super 14 and Cricket Australia aren’t going to wait for V8 Supercars and motorsport to catch up. – GT