the Holden Commodore – the successor to the iconic
Torana – and the Ford Falcon.
There was less diversity and greater field spread; a
gulf between ‘factory’ teams which enjoyed the backing
of the brand they raced and the privateers who tried
to compete on that same uneven playing field. In time
that changed. The privateers were slowly pushed out as
the sport became more professional only for the whole
thing to come full circle with now next to no factory
investment.
In the early 1990s we were still pumping out the
Commodore and Falcon at factories in Broadmeadows,
Geelong and Elizabeth. The automotive industry was
strong and it was willing to invest its marketing dol-
lars in motorsport. But as the world changed so did the
industry’s attitude.Purse strings were pulled tighter and, while V8
Supercars opened its regulations to allow new manu-
facturers, only Nissan was especially interested. Volvo
has come and gone and Betty Klimenko’s private Mer-
cedes-AMG project has been mothballed. Ford pulled its
investment and Holden has ended a long relationship
with the Walkinshaw family in favour of Triple Eight.
In the face of the shrinking local automotive sector,
the likes of James Warburton and the Supercars board
have been charged with growing the sport. They’ve
rebranded and moved the goal posts in an attempt
to attract manufacturer investment, but with so little
money in the industry it’s proved difficult. The trouble
they face is that Australia is a tiny market. Supercars is
a unique product. There is little incentive for manufac-
turers to throw their dollars behind a programme here
which has no economy of scale.
That was the strength of Super Touring, a universal
product which was raced in multiple markets. Its weak-
ness, of course, was that in Australia the cars were alien.
Few of us drove or aspired to drive a Mondeo or Primera,
making any connection to fans more difficult.
There was also no hiding away from the fact that
there were two touring-car championships fighting for
a market of just 20-million people. One, it seems, was
always doomed to fail.
“If you look at what happened with IndyCar racing in
the United States when they tried to have two catego-
ries, CART and IndyCar, it didn’t work,” argues Jones,
who now not only heads one of the largest Supercars
teams but also sits on the Supercars board.
“It’s no different here. We’ve got two lots of touring
cars, one’s pretty much based on four-cylinder Euro-
pean-type cars and the other one’s a heart-pounding V8.
“While (Super Touring) ended up with a reasonable
following, Supercars was being pushed pretty hard.SUPER TOURINGBELOW: Nissan and Volvo
eventually returned to
Mount Panorama in
Supercars.
ABOVE: Renault’s British
Touring Car Championship
team added to the prestige of
the Super Touring Bathurst
1000 in 1997.