Aside from Will Power’s commanding victory in the Firestone Grand Prix on the streets of St Petersburg the weekend before last, perhaps the most interesting news for Australian observers of the Verizon IndyCar Series was the news, first reported on SpeedCafe.com ahead of the season-opener, that Team Penske are looking at fielding an entry in the V8 Supercar Series.
Team principal Tim Cindric said, “My feeling is I would like to find a way for Team Penske to be involved in the series. It’s also my job to ensure we get involved in the right way.” A decision will apparently be made after May’s Indianapolis 500. Rumours have tied Penske to a full (or at least partial) take-over of the Dick Johnson team.
No matter where you go in the motor racing world, Team Penske is a legendary name synonymous with winning, particularly at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where Roger Penske, known as ‘The Captain’ has amassed an incredible fifteen wins at the famed Indianapolis 500, and has fielded cars for legends of Indy like Rick Mears (four victories), Helio Castroneves (three victories) and three generations of the Unser clan: Bobby, Al and Al Junior. This year, Penske has Australia’s Will Power driving alongside Castroneves and Juan Pablo Montoya, as stout an Indy line-up as there’s ever been.
Having a Penske team in the V8 Supercar Series brings instant and heavy international credibility. The goal has always been to grow the series internationally, and the sky could very well be the limit when it comes to this expansion. Where Penske goes, other teams tend to come to try and compete. You beat Penske, and you’re flat-out good. That’s how it’s always been, and always will be, as long as The Captain has a say in it.
With burgeoning international interest in mind, I took a look through the various great racetracks around the world, and came up with five of the best, where I’d love to see V8 Supercars race:
Road America
One of the old-school race tracks, and one, unfortunately, that most Australians aren’t aware exists.
Ask just about any North American race fan what their favourite track is, and you’ll almost certainly hear them say Road America – probably the equivalent to our Mt Panorama, Bathurst circuit. The 4.048-mile/6.515km concrete circuit, just about the longest on the continent, winds it’s way through the Wisconsin countryside near the village of Elkhart Lake, and is a favourite of every driver who races there.
Why not? With turns like Canada Corner, the Carousel and the lightning-fast Kink, this is a real driver’s track. Every year, sports cars and even NASCAR Nationwide cars put on an amazing show, and it isn’t that much of a stretch to imagine that the V8 Supercars could do the same. Imagine Courtney, Whincup and Lowndes three wide down the back straight, tussling for position into the kink – a salivating thought.
Brands Hatch
The Indy course is short and sweet, but the best racing at Brands Hatch, the spiritual home of British motor racing, is on the long Grand Prix Circuit (3.90km/2.433mi) that includes Stirlings, Sheene Curve, Dingle Dell and the legendary Paddock Hill Bend, where a driver plunges downhill, fast, through a blind corner.
If there’s one problem with the majority of Australian racing circuits as compared to those in Europe and North America it’s the lack of natural elevation changes, of which there’s plenty at Brands. The locals love their touring car racing – the British Touring Car Championship is one of the more famous series in the world – so there’s definitely a market for tin-top racing in England that the V8s could tap into. The racing would be fierce!
Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps
Like Bathurst and Road America, this is one of the world’s great race tracks. Eau Rouge corner is an absolute belter to start off a lap, and the rest of the circuit, which winds through the beautiful Ardennes Forest, is just as exciting. There are twists, turns, fast corners, slow ones, and more elevation change than you can poke a stick at. Also like Bathurst, it’s a public road course transformed for a race weekend.
Home to the Belgian Formula One Grand Prix (one of the more popular and well-attended races on the calendar), the 24 hours of Spa for GT cars and a 1000km race for the new World Endurance Championship, Spa is now 7.004 kilometres long, shortened and changed over the years, down from being a whopping 15km track in the years before World War Two.
There are few better ‘driver’s tracks’ in the world than this one, and watching the V8s funnel up the hill through Eau Rogue before blasting off into the Belgian countryside would be fantastic.
Long Beach
The street circuit that every other street circuit – Monaco excepted – wants to be like.
First a home to the United States Formula One round, and now IndyCar, the Toyota Grand Prix not only revitalised the rundown city of Long Beach, California, but it is now looked upon as the most prestigious road race in America, and the second-most important event in the IndyCar Series. The party atmosphere that the event has taken on could be compared with the Adelaide street race. It’s Monaco without the pretension.
This iconic street course begins coming off the final turn, a slow, ponderous hairpin, before the long blast down Lakeshore Drive, with packed grandstands on either side of the track, and through the Fountain Turn and, unlike a lot of street circuits, including the afore mentioned Monaco, there are enough passing opportunities to ensure that any race here, be it sports cars, IndyCars or even the annual celebrity race, is full of action.
Then there’s the weather, which is pretty much perfect year-round in Southern California, and passionate race fans. There are few better motorsports events anywhere.
Circuit de la Sarthe – Le Mans
Highly unlikely that we’ll ever see the V8 Supercars here, but we can all dream. The full Circuit de la Sarthe Le Mans course – not the 10-turn Bugatti course used for the MotoGP race each year, as well as the 24 hour motorcycle event – is, hands down, the greatest race track on the face of the earth, and home to the sternest test of driver, pit crew and car: the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
There are few faster and more exhilarating race tracks in the world than this mixture of permanent road course and temporary street circuit. Le Mans prototypes are at full throttle for more than 85% of a lap of the 13.629 kilometres of tarmac that rockets cars through the picturesque countryside.
Unbelievably, the lap record for the course with such famous turns as the Porsche Curves, Tetre Rouge and Arnage, is 3:19.074, set by a Peugeot 908 prototype with Loic Duval behind the wheel back in 2010.
Imagine a full field of growling V8 Supercars heading down the Mulsanne Straight, following in the tyre treads of some of the sport’s greatest names, who have won at Le Mans – Jacky Ickx, Derek Bell, Henri Pescarolo, Australia’s own David Brabham and, of course, Dane Tom Kristensen, the King of Le Mans, who has nine overall victories.
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