Marcus and Crash Test

[Lee]

plus any other Austrailians on this forum,
A question. In previous posts, you have said that NASCAR racing is either dead, or dying in your country. I wonder if you could explain why this is occuring, or has occured. Was it poor promotion, not enough teams competing, lack of intrest on the part of the fans, or some other reason? From visiting the website for the Thunderdome Racetrack, I would have thought they were doing quite well. Just curious as to what happened. Thanks.

[marcus]

well Lee Im not sure why it has failed..but sadly I think it has..our first race was back in 1988 when the late Neil Bonnet took victory ..the class did grow a bit for at least 5 or 6 years but when we couldnt get and americans out here to race and the fact Calder was the only oval things started to slide..so they built an oval in Adelaide..not a very good one mind you but now we have 2 ovals and then they tried road racing but again that seemed to fail because they were to heavy and ran out of brakes to early..so they tried night racing at the thunderdome (I attended the very first night race and was impressed) and things picked up for a bit but the crowds stayed away after a while..since then they lost Tv coverage due to cars not showing up and a general lack of interest from the public and the grids got smaller and smaller...possibly to no one knew many of the drivers because they came from series that were not publicly known so well or started their racing on the ovals..then they got Tv back and we thought right things might take off..but the drivers stayed away through problems with bob Janes organization at the track (which seems to have been the biggest problem)..so now we have the problem of not enough cars ...to many unknown drivers and just bad organization at the track and basically thats it..i dont know what the answer is to fix it but I just dont think its gonna work over here for many reasons..we have V8 supercar which is aussie built cars and aussie drivers and thats the top level in this country and will be for a while ..and some have had a go like Brad jones , russell ingall and we even had kevin scwhantz out here for a season or 2 before he went home and failed in the Busch series..but i guess we see the races from the states and then compare them to our races and 10 cars compared to 43 cars just doesnt stake up for action (heck i get more people showing up for my local kart meeting than that)...i guess we just need more cars better drivers (maybe some amaricans) and better infrostructure to get the series going again but when that day will be Im not sure....Im sure crash has his own spin on why this has failed and i look forward to reading that to

[Crash Test]

Well i would have to say that the begining of the end started a few years back. Calder Park were always very slow in getting its act together with respect to TV coverage. Many competitors stated that they could not get sponsorship without Tv, so the competitors left.

It never really had a top flight TV deal.

Another thing is that there is only one serious oval in the land, which basically means that the fan base for the best part of Nascar was very weak. The Nascars had many meetings on road courses, but these were mainly not very well attended. They also had many meetings running along side the F1 and Cart, but these seemingly always turned into farces with wall to wall carnage, which didnt help with credibility.

We have Nascar, Auscar (more production based Australian stock cars), Sportsmans (old auscars), HQs (old stock prod sedans, basically crash em up specials) and just recently Legends. Its all there, but basically people have lost interest in it, and finally Calder has lost interest in it. Basically it wont happen any more unless a new promoter puts their hand up

A great shame, i think the public would have loved them had they paid any attention to them...

[Lee]

Guys,
I'm sorry that it happened, or is happening. I remember when they opened Thunderdome, There was big talk here in the States about it. Everyone here seemed to think that Bob Jane was a really good guy, We use to have a program here on ESPN, I can't remember the name of it now, Bob Jenkins was the host, and they covered the opening, and the races run there. Maybe if they tried to get television coverage on Speedvison. I know they show all varieties of motorsports. I would think that they would cover the races there. Sponsors, I'm sure might be a big problem, but thats true everywhere. I hope that somehow your NASCAR series can be salvaged. Good luck.

Lee

[Heeltoe6]

The program w/ Jenkins, was either "Speedweek" of "Checkered Flag" both basically weekly editions of rpm2nite before the deuce came out. I know Speedweek was the latter incarnation, cause it was around in the 90s and got pretty bad with Tony George spewing off during interviews, but I don't know exactly it began and Checkered Flag ended.

[Lee]

Thanks Heeltoe6,
It was Speedweeks. I don't know why I couldn't remember the name, I always watched it. Guess age is taking it's tole on my memory .