The Business of Sport

[Marcos Skaife]

I am guessing that in Australia as it is here in New Zealand Profit is a very bad word. It promote thoughts of all kinds of evil and is just in general a really terrible concept to try and achieve. Those that do are the devil personified and not fit to walk our streets!!

I am here to tell you that is wrong. Without profit there is no reason to carry on.You cannot expand and in a lot of cases maintain what you already have.

Avesco is not a car club hiring out a circuit 6 times a year for club racing,it is a professionally run business that supports many franchises(the teams) and keeps many,many people employed.

Big Tony may actually not be personally interested in the car racing,and he may be making a lot of money out of it,(lets not forget he owns %25) so he will be trying his hardest to make it grow. In business it is quite often the case that you have to expand or die.

When the local support eventually dies off(and it will, just check out your motor racing history)and the cheques from Avesco get smaller and smaller,when the economy flattens out and the sponsors havn`t got the same kind of money to throw around and the teams start laying people off because they can`t afford to keep their 40+ team members,who will really care if there are 3 or 4 offshore races overseas.

All Aussie Bernie is trying to do is ensure the survival of the sport/entertainment business he has helped create and enjoy a chardonnay or two while he is at it.Like him or hate him,the whole deal is where it is today not soley because of him,but because of his guidance and vision mixed with the teams input(another fact that gets lost in the translation)

Profit and expansion are neccessary and not actually as bad as you think.

[GTRMagic]

There is no problem with generating profit... presuming of course you are paying full economic cost for the assets you are utilising to achieve that profit.

It can be argued that AVESCO/SEL are not paying the full economic cost, that they merely cherry-pick the sport to take the most commercially viable projects fron the local landscape... while leaving others to wilt and die.

The most glaring analogy is one of mining... the mining company extracts the gold/coal/iron ore etc from the ground, makes a shedload of money from it... and as part of their budget, they also put the ground back the way it was (within reason) before they got there....

AVESCO should not be a charity... but the answer in the end is that the only way you have a top end, is to have a middle and a bottom end... which is not getting any support at all from this direction....

[pete55]

This situation has basically come about because CAMS did not ensure that the rest of the sport was looked after. They gave AVESCO the V8's without setting guidelines in place to ensure the sport as a whole was going to be looked after. This is typical of CAMS though, they don't seem to be able to look past the end of their nose. They also seem to wilt to characters like TC.

[GTRMagic]

But that begs the question as to why CAMS had to get rid of their stake in AVESCO.

The clever thing for CAMS would have been to hang onto it as a shareholder without management rights, and just slurp the dividends from that operation.

Then they could build the biggest gin palace HQ around, and update the boss' expensive European sports cars once in a while....

Opportunity lost....

[cavvy]

Going off at a bit of a tangent after accepting V8 Supercar & AVESCO are the reality they are, who is responsible to get other racing up - is it a Porsche Carrera Cup style group?
What role do the circuits have these days, they seem to me to have been sidelined - even to the point of Linfox Phillip Island renting the circuit to AVESCO to run a round of the V8s - where does this put circuits like Wanneroo & Mallala, are they to try & promote club racing, can they take a leaf from the way the speedway promoters work?
In days gone by did the likes of Bob Jane & the Perich family put series like the Toby Lee together? Can it be done these days or does the V8SC franchise system stop competitors competing at non AVESCO meetings?
I'm sure the Winton guys can comment, please do.