Where do we go from here?

It was with great interest that I read Peter Wright’s article in the August 2019 (V29N8) edition about what would be required to reboot F1. I very much enjoyed it and I believe it was important, because it’s time for us to start an informed conversation about where motorsport needs to go.

One of the things I am noticing is that every major category that I’m either directly involved in or have customers who are involved in – whether it’s Supercars here in Australia, DTM, sportscars, GT3 and others – is doing some hard thinking about its future. This is not motivated by expanding the brand, though. This is more about long term survival. The time for talk is over. Action needs to be taken, otherwise motor racing will degenerate into just club and rich guy racing, with a handful of elite formulae on very shaky ground.

First things first, what exactly is the situation right now? If we wind the clocks back quite a few years, motorsport commanded attention. As a teenager I remember the huge media interest on Adelaide in 1985 for Australia’s first real F1 grand prix. Whole countries used to stop to watch events like the Bathurst 1000, the Daytona and Indy 500s and Le Mans. And who can forget the global outpouring of grief at