Bob Barnard Track Engineering

I am not talking about the lights at Bahrain but one of the best races I have seen for years! So this is "taxi cab" racing is it Mr. Montezemolo? I saw the look on your face as the Force India steamed past your Ferrari on the straight and as you turned away I thought "he's going home." And he was. What a joke all that BS from Bernie and Montezemolo about the state of F1. Good on Todt for turning them down.

There were passes all over the track and great racing. Ricciardo passed Vettel twice, good on you Aussie, shows how good Vettel really is. The Mercedes pair put on a show, and it was great to see Rosberg's reaction when he got out of the car. I was fearing a lot of pouting, but no. Naturally he wanted to beat Lewis, and only Lewis knows how he did not, but he said on the podium that it was the best race of his life. It looked it from where we sat. The Mercs finally showed their true pace in those last 12 laps after the safety car, pulling out 22 seconds over Perez who also has Mercedes power. Normally two drivers fighting like that slow each other down. The race time was 98 minutes against last year's V8's 96 minutes, so who says these are slow? Allowing for a lot of laps behind the pace car they are probably faster.

Paddy Lowe and the boys must have been dying on that pit wall watching that. I was excited about the prospect of these two fighting even before the race started, and they did not let us down. Good on you Mercedes for letting them race. What a season we have in store.

How Lewis held off Nico on those harder tires shows just how good he is, not to knock Nico, but he is a racer. Not sure how Vettel gets away with running people off the track like that, and what can we say about Maldonado? 5 grid places for that when Ricciardo got 10 for a loose wheel in pit lane? Come on Stewards, sort yourselves out. Shades of Grosjean at Spa.

These new low noses have been questioned already for just the sort of accident we saw yesterday. If it were the Mercedes or McLaren nose it may not have happened, but when changing rules we have to look at all angles of impact, not just from behind.

Talking of exciting races it is now 25 years since the first World Championship Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix at Phillip Island. A lot of memories, and AMCN is having a special edition to recall some of them. Some of them are better left unsaid. It was a very difficult time with much personal pain and stress to pull it off. We stupidly believed that if we showed just how great this race could be we would receive the support we needed. But no, it just brought out the rats who then wanted what we created.

Last evening I had a long phone interview with Darryl Flack, a journalist with Australian Motor Cycle News. They are revisiting the events surrounding the inaugural World Championship Motorcyle Grand Prix staged at Phillip Island 25 years ago. I was the promoter for that event, rebuilt the old track from the sheep station it had become into a world benchmark circuit, and lobbied the FIM to obtain the race for Australia. Australia has had a Grand Prix continuously since then, both at Phillip Island and at the Eastern Creek circuit, which I also built, in Sydney.

The first race was an enormous success, if not financially. It cost a lot to redevelop the track and promote a new event, even with an Australian World Champion to help in Wayne Gardner. It was referred to by a journalist in the Daytona media center a few years ago as "The Woodstock" of motorcycle GPs, and he was right. Over 100,000 spectators on race day, most of whom had camped out in the surrounding farmers fields for a few days. A fairy tale finish after a great race with our Champion winning. Great times, but not pulled off without a lot of trauma to me and my company. History will record we moved the race to the new track in Sydney to get away from the tobacco advertising the teams then carried, not a move we made willingly, but it was a matter of survival.

So a new track was built from scratch on Government land in Sydney's western suburb, Eastern Creek. Try as we may to avoid that name from sticking it just did. The Government switched some of the land on me shortly after we had received the ok from the FIM to move, and the track layout changed to conform to what I had been given. Not that I thought it a bad layout, but I knew in my mind that the yardstick it would be judged by was Phillip Island. A hiding to nothing as they say in the classics. The track immediately became a political football, both between the real politicians in New South Wales, and the internal politics of the Australian Motorcycle World. The Opposition party and their media mates made life hell for me and the Government over the cost and the Government paying for it. Laughable now when we see Governments doing it all the time. Eastern Creek cost $24m in 1989, compare that to the cost of the F1 race for Melbourne of $50m plus each year, and they have no permanent circuit to show for it for others to use and enjoy.

So Eastern Creek became the "red headed step child" as they say. But it is still there and where would NSW motorsport be without it, with only one other circuit in the State, and so busy they have just built an extension. I must have done something right after all. So, during the interview I was deeply touched when told of the sidecar racer who recenlty passed away and asked for his ashes to be spread on Eastern Creek because he loved it so much. The wheel has turned full circle as they say.

I was married on the start line of the first track I built in Adelaide for the F1 race, so where should my ashes be spread? Phillip Island, Eastern Creek, or one of the other great tracks that I have been fortunate to have been given the opportunity to build?