SUPER
TOURING
CARS
Cars that entered the
Super Touring Bathurst
1000s in 1997 and 1998.^Alfa Romeo 155
Audi A4 Quattro
BMW 318i
BMW 320i
Ford Mondeo
Ford Telstar
Honda Accord
Honda Civic
Honda Integra
Hyundai Lantra
Mazda 626
Nissan Primera
Nissan Sentra
Peugeot 405 Mi16
Peugeot 406
Renault Laguna
Suzuki Baleno
Toyota Camry
Toyota Carina
Toyota Corolla
Vauxhall Cavalier
Vauxhall Vectra
Volvo S40
Volvo 850“Bathurst was a Super Touring car race for a couple of
years, so it started to get a bit popular but it really just
became a battle between BMW, Audi and Volvo.
“Not that that’s a bad thing, but there was just never
going to be enough room for Super Touring and for
Supercars.
“I’m not sure how many people are in America, but
they didn’t have the population to support IndyCar
racing and CART. It didn’t have much of a chance here.”
Of course, the landscape is now very different. Super
Touring has long since been buried and Supercars is now
without rival at the top of the motorsport tree.
It’s ironic then that its regulations are moving closer
to those of Super Touring from some two decades ago,
albeit dressed up as Gen2, a model which has been used
successfully to grow GT3 racing globally.
The strength of GT3 racing is its manufacturer
involvement, a state of affairs which has come as a result
of a strong global market that allows for the sorts of
economies of scale Supercars can only dream of.
There’s a tangible link to manufacturers’ road cars,
too, while the balance of performance – a different
style of parity which keeps all cars within an accepted
envelope of performance – allows for the strengths and
weaknesses of each respective design.
“GT is, I guess in some ways, somewhat similar to
Super Touring, but it’s found a different niche in the
marketplace where it caters for very wealthy guys that
want to see their cars go round and have a bit of a pedal
themselves,” Jones reasons.
“The difference with Super Touring was there was
actually proper factory teams with drivers, it wasn’t so
much a gentleman sport.”
Beyond that, there are potential commercial issues
with Stéphane Ratel and the SRO, which runs GT3
racing globally and owns the intellectual property for
the feeder GT4 class, not to mention the FIA which has
an over-arching interest in the category.
There is simply no alternative to Supercars currently
on the table, giving it an unchallenged opportunity to
lay out its plans for the future.
Its decision to move to Gen2 has a degree of logic and
more than a hint of irony when one realises that we’ve
been here before in Australian motorsport.
The cards Supercars played as it set out a stall all those
years ago, linking it to a history it was perhaps not really
entitled to claim and establishing a style of motorsport
the country came to accept, is now its own worst enemy.
The challenge now is changing that mindset, creating
the belief that the sport’s future is linked to its past and
energising fans to buy into the new style of motorsport.
It’s why we now hear terms like ‘road relevance’ in a
sport which has had only tenuous links to the cars you
and I have chauffeured the family around in for the last
four decades.
The marketing arm of Supercars is doing what it can
to link its future with its past, to excite us and lure back
an industry devoid of the riches it once had.“THERE WAS JUST NEVER
GOING TO BE ENOUGH ROOM
FOR SUPER TOURING AND
FOR SUPERCARS.”- BRAD JONES