Surfing cable with the remote late at night, we’ve lucked into Champ Car, Nascar and Indycar. It’s a testament to our being a professional couch potato that we even tune in to NHK for some Japan Grand Touring Car Championships races even though we can’t understand the Japanese commentary. Also some Australian V8 races with their sophisticated onboard video and telemetry helping us make out what the commentators are saying. Aussies speak a strange form of English.
F1 addicts will have to get their motor sports fix elsewhere after this season’s last race in Shanghai. The A1 Grand Prix could help here although the television coverage of the race and the races itself still have a lot of catching up to do to reach the level of excitement that F1 offers.
But A1GP is just two races into its inaugural season and hopefully the coverage improves. As for the races themselves, there’s a lot of exciting action but those used to the F1 hyper-speeds will find A1GP race cars more like go kart action. Even the sounds of engine are just not the same, certainly not the pulse-quickening whine of 18,000-plus rpms of F1 V10 engines. We’re wondering what F1 V8s will sound like next season.
While we get to watch a lot of international motor sports, we can’t seem to chance upon local motor sports, not even AF3 racing, an international series that we’d like to call our own.
And what we do catch on TV are mostly replays of races held almost two or more years ago. We’re not interested in those.
At the start of its season, AF3 said the races to be held out of the country would be seen on Star Sports. We don’t know if they’ve been shown at all or we just missed it. If there is some coverage, we’d have to fault AF3 organizers for not doing much to tell local followers of the series when they could watch the races.
We’re especially interested in the races won by Tyson Sy.
Local motor sports also seem to lack coverage on TV. Motor sports could grow a lot faster as a spectator sport with TV coverage. Slalom and drag racing, which draws a lot of participants and held in relatively more accessible venues, would be great to watch on the boob tube. Rally cross is another form of motor sport that could be TV friendly given the proper treatment.
We hear our friends at Auto Extreme are covering slaloms but we haven’t been able to watch the program. We believe Mike Potenciano has been covering a lot of motor sports for his program, but it’s either his program comes on the hours we aren’t channel surfing, our cable provider doesn’t carry the channel that carries Mike’s program.
There’s a need for good motor sports programs to cover the races on prime hours. That may provide the tipping point for local motors sport to really develop into spectator sport.
One thing about putting a local motor sports on TV though, cable has given local enthusiasts a taste for sophisticated coverage of races. That may be the greatest challenge for anyone thinking of putting more motor racing events on cable regularly.
