The Motorsport Category Australia Shouldn’t Have Lost

*As published in Velocity Magazine, August 2016*

Last year, CAMS created waves in the Australian motorsport community when they decided to severely prune the categories that would be granted “national” status, as either a championship or a series. The premise of their rationalisation wasn’t without merit – the theory was that fewer strong categories would be more sustainable than a greater number of weaker classes competing for the same competitor base.

However, the way they went about announcing their decision understandably raised the ire of many competitors, especially those who owned race cars belonging to one of the categories on the chopping block.

The new Australian Formula 4 Championship has struggled to attract numbers since its 2015 introduction, and let’s face it; Australian motorsport culture has always centred around powerful, rear-wheel-drive touring cars, not open-wheelers. If you’re an aspiring professional racer who wants to stay in Australia, Supercars is the destination, otherwise you’re headed overseas.

The pathway to Supercars seems to have become less, not more, clearly defined over the last couple of seasons. Previously, after competing in go-karts, you raced in Formula Ford, stepped up to either Kumho Series, Carrera Cup or Development Series, and then progressed to the main game if you were good enough.

Now, the options are less clear-cut. Formula Ford is still highly relevant, but finding the budget to take the next step to compete in Kumho Series, Dunlop Series or Carrera Cup is prohibitive for many people.

Formula 4 cars are over-tyred and the handling characteristics don’t really translate to racing a Supercar. The Aussie Racing Car Series is fun to watch and the cars are enjoyable to drive, but – Nick Percat aside – the series has never had a background of producing professional drivers.

The new Toyota 86 Series is very affordable, professionally-run and has manufacturer backing, but the cars bear very little resemblance to Supercars in terms of their driving characteristics.

If only there was a category that was affordable, had rear-wheel-drive cars with enough power to deliver similar handling to Supercars, and had enough exposure to make it a viable stepping stone for young drivers out of karts to attract enough sponsorship to further their career opportunities…

Guess what? There was a category that ticked all of those boxes, but unfortunately it died quietly at the end of 2012. That category was Commodore Cup, and this is the story of how it came to exist, why it was successful for a number of years but also why it ultimately failed.

Commodore Cup started at a very grass-roots level at Winton Raceway in 1994, when a group of enthusiasts with VH Commodores powered by the venerable 253ci (4.2 Litre) V8 engine convinced Winton CEO Mick Ronke to allow them to run in their own race at state-level, rather than as a separate class within Sports Sedans.

The series grew, with names like David Gittus, Gary Baxter, Dean Crosswell and Christian D’Agostin among the more prominent Commodore Cuppers throughout the 1990s.

Come the early 2000s and the category continued to grow, as it struck a chord with quite a wide-ranging audience. There were the successful business owners who had enough money behind them to compete for recreation but didn’t want to jump straight into the deep end of V8 Development Series, like Geoff Emery, Tony Bates, Geoff Fontaine and Ross McGregor, but there were also a number of young guns pursuing a professional career, like Lee and Brett Holdsworth, Ashley Cooper and Marcus Zukanovic.

At the beginning of 2004 the series upgraded to a newer VS Commodore bodyshell, but in the interests of allowing the older cars to be competitive, the mechanical specifications were kept the same, with the old, carburetted 4.2L V8 still in use.

It looked like a strong formula and when Lee Holdsworth stepped up to the V8 Development Series in 2004 and started winning races in his first season, Commodore Cup looked like it was well on the way to becoming a genuine feeder series from go-karts to V8 Supercars. It had decent exposure running as part of the Shannons Nationals and the cars, with their locked diffs and under-tyred footprint, had handling characteristics not dissimilar from V8s.

The period from 2007 to 2009 looked, from the outside, to be the continuation of a strong period for the category with more young drivers like Nick Parker, Michael Tancredi, Scott Andrews and Josh Hughes coming into the class, while the introduction of a two-driver endurance round allowed a mixture of established V8 Supercar stars and new faces to team up with the series regulars, which achieved the objective of boosting media exposure while also giving potential new competitors a taste of the cars and series.

In hindsight though, it was this period, and some of the decisions made during what was, behind the scenes, a rather turbulent time for the category management, that set Commodore Cup on the path to its ultimate demise.

So what killed Commodore Cup? Basically, there were three factors at play: the cars, the category management, and the lack of a strategy to attract new competitors.

By 2009, the VS-model Commodore Cup cars had reached their limitations in terms of development. The 4.2 Litre engines had been modified to a stage where they were producing considerable power outputs – higher, in fact, than the brand-new VE Commodore road cars of the day. All of that tweaking and tuning might have improved the straight-line performance but it severely affected one other key area: reliability.

It was unusual for a driver to complete more than one season on the same engine, and there was rarely a round where there wasn’t at least one driver parked on the side of the racetrack with white smoke pouring out of their Commodore. The cost of a replacement motor – quoted figures for a race-prepped engine were often upwards of $15,000 – meant that a driver who blew an engine was often sidelined for several rounds while they came up with the money to source a replacement.

The reason the engines cost so much was because a lot of the componentry was approaching three decades old, and had to be specifically produced for the category by component suppliers. The limited production runs and lack of economies of scale naturally resulted in higher prices.

Also, because the category had evolved from club-level, the technical regulations had never been written as tightly as perhaps they should have, and so there were a number of areas of ambiguity. As the series gained more exposure and the stakes were raised, so some competitors started pushing the technical boundaries.

This created some ill feeling between competitors and accusations started flying around the paddock.

What was not helping matters was the lack of independent category management. This was again a throwback to Commodore Cup’s club-level roots, with the category being managed by individuals who were also involved as competitors within the category. This might have been workable for a state-level class, but in a national series with some intensely competitive drivers, there were a number of decisions taken that seemed to be in the best interests of the category management rather than the series as a whole, and this again left a bad taste in the mouth of some competitors, who started looking for alternative places to go racing.

Drivers like Geoff Emery, Tony Bates and Marcus Zukanovic had both the funding and ability to go and race in V8 Development Series… so they did. Others like Nick Parker and Michael Tancredi, who didn’t have the financial backing, went and raced speedway, while Scott Andrews switched to Formula Ford before heading overseas to pursue other opportunities. Adam Beechey stuck around for a while and won three Commodore Cup titles as the category started to decline, before moving to the V8 Utes.

With these drivers moving on, there needed to be new blood coming into Commodore Cup, but at this stage the stark reality was it didn’t present an attractive option to many people at all. By 2011, the youngest VS Commodores were approaching 15 years old and just didn’t appeal to the young go-karters looking for the next step towards a professional career, and the older, “gentlemen” drivers had too many alternatives to choose from.

The final national Commodore Cup race was held at Sandown in 2012, with eight cars participating. Adam Beechey and Tony Bates entertained with the crowd by putting on an enthralling dice over the 10-lap journey, eventually crossing the finish line less than a second apart. While the demise of Commodore Cup was a sad day, the Beechey-Bates battle at least left everyone with happy memories of what the category had produced over previous 18 years.

The saddest part though, is that had some slightly different decisions been taken, Commodore Cup could still exist today. If the category had updated to a more modern, reliable engine, it would have improved parity while also reducing costs by largely eliminating the expensive engine rebuilds.

If the class had upgraded to a newer bodyshell, it would have been far more attractive to both sponsors and potential new competitors.

If an independent administrator had driven the direction of the category, a lot of the politics which ultimately contributed to Commodore Cup’s demise might have been avoided.

And if a strategy to attract more youngsters into the class and give them a viable pathway to a tin-top racing career had been adopted, there would have been a more sustainable influx of new competitors to replace those who had moved on to other categories.

There’s still a place for a category like Commodore Cup in the Australian motorsport scene, but it would probably need manufacturer support to be sustainable, and with the rear-wheel-drive Commodore set to cease production next year, the ship has well and truly sailed for any Holden involvement.

So people like me are left to reflect on the happy times of Commodore Cup, and keep thinking about what might have been…