Bob Barnard Track Engineering

Although most of my blogs relate to the four wheel brigade my life has in fact been balanced between cars and motorcycles, promoting MotoGPs and working for King Kenny. Not much going on in the racing world except for a couple of items that caught my eye.

Mick Doohan enjoyed himself testing a V8Supercar yesterday, but said he did not see himself racing one. The piece commented on Troy Bayliss flirting with V8s after retiring, but there have been much more serious ex riders than that. Aaron Slight raced in the BTCC without a lot of success but acquitted himself OK, but Wayne Gardner has had a very good four wheel career, both in Australian V8s, Japan, and one appearance at Le Mans. I'm not sure the good ol' boys of the V8s gave Wayne much of a go, probably did not like him turning up with the Coke sponsorship and his own team instead of earning his stripes. But he had already done that on two wheels.

The other story unfolding at the moment is about our US series run by the Daytona Motorsports Group, DMG, and the Virginia International Raceway, VIR, which has staged a very successful round of the championship for ten years. It was announced the other day by DMG that VIR had turned down the contract for this year and cancelled the race which was scheduled for August. Now VIR has come out and said they were only given the contract in June after repeated requests for one since December last year. Obviously they did not like the terms, but as they say, even if they did the time left to organize and properly promote the race was ridiculous. I've been there as a promoter and the value of everything is drastically reduced if you do not have time to properly leverage it. All is not well with this once great series with top riders sitting on the sidelines or going to the British series for lack of money and interest continues to fall. A death spiral. As I said to someone when told of this, bikes no one wants to watch with riders no one knows.

On a final note it is a bit amusing that Team Lotus has bought Red Bull's KERS unit for next year. Do they not watch the race and see the problems RB has had? I know they are using the same drive train but seriously. This is the same team that still cannot get Trulli's power steering to work.