I have a confession to make. I haven’t watched the Australian Touring Car Championship for 15 years. Not one round has flashed past my eyes.
Not even the famed Bathurst 1000 during that time.
But I am prepared to dive back into a full-on interest level for next year’s series. Why? The arrival of both Nissan and Mercedes as additional manufacturers.
I was one of those people who happily sat, year after year during my school days, watching the Great Race around the Mount Panorama circuit, in-car cameras and all, on Channel Seven from my lounge room every October.
But the moment when the controlling body AVESCO joined forces with Channel Ten and decided to run their own version in 1997, dubbed the “Primus 1000 Classic”, in some desperate attempt to capture the die-hard fan via the media, I personally boycotted the entire thing.
There was still the AMP 1000 – the real deal on the real date – to enjoy, with Super Tourer class cars and international drivers.
That was always what Bathurst meant to me.
It should be a prestige, stand-alone event, designed to test the reliability of each car and the nerve of each driver.
Under the AVESCO/Ten partnership, it simply ended up becoming just another round of the championship, stripping it of all mystique.
Equally infuriating was the sudden, apparently-always-there assumption made by the new series promoters that Aussie motor racing was only about ‘Ford versus Holden’, when, in fact, both are brands with origins or considerable input from outside Australia – in particular the United States and United Kingdom.
If you believe some of the publicity surrounding the V8 Supercar series over the past decade, it would seem that since the beginning of the cosmos there had only been there two makes of car and nothing else at all.
What rubbish. The whole reason touring car racing used to be fantastic was the variety involved – the class sections, Morris Minors, Mini Coopers, Ford (Falcon, Sierras, etc), Holden, Nissan, Toyota, Volvo, BMW, etc. Marvellous stuff.
Although it’s only two added makes again next year, I can’t wait. Let’s hope a few more join like Audi, Toyota and so on. But Mercs and Nissans will be a solid start.
And then there was the vaguely funny aspect to it all with regard to the drivers themselves. I, too, had thrilled to the likes of mountain-king legends like Peter Brock (although I was always a Dick Johnson man myself), Larry Perkins, Alan Moffat et al.
But at some point after the AVESCO/Ten deal, the drivers also seemed, to me, to lose some degree of interest through over-familiarity.
It felt like the same drivers, the sons of the same drivers, the grandsons of the same drivers from the 70s and 80s, driving for the same teams owned by the same family of drivers. Sad to say, it simply did not interest me one iota whatsoever.
But now we are headed back in the direction of the proper, good old days – and ironically it’s all been tagged under the slogan ‘Car of the Future’.
Well, sometimes – as Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown would say – you have to go back to secure the future.
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