ANOTHER DAY, another TCR-to-Australia story in our local Motorsport press. 

AutoAction is reporting this week that efforts continue to introduce the global Touring Car category to domestic competition as soon as next year.

Pick up the magazine to read more (and support our local motorsport press industry in the process – Ed) but suffice to say it’s a grand plan that includes running at major Supercars events, while joining with other series’ and races as a separate class.

It’s the story that just won’t go away and frankly, it’s a worry.

Because the very last thing that this country needs now is another Touring Car category.. or another category, full stop.

We’re not trying to be negative, but a majority of Australia’s national racing categories will race in Queensland across the next two weeks and a sweep across the entry lists doesn’t exactly offer full fields and an excess of competitors looking for another place to have a skid.

Supercars is fine, bigger this weekend than in many years thanks to four wildcard entries from Super 2. TCM has 24 cars entered, V8 Touring Cars 17 and the Utes – admittedly in transition to the new formula for next year – a dozen or so while F4 has their usual 13. At the Shannons Nationals round next week there’ll be just over 20 Production Cars, a dozen Prototypes, 16 or so Porsche’s and somewhere between that and 20 in GT Trophy.

Ironically, the biggest field in a fortnight of racing in the Sunshine state will probably be the Hyundai Excels who make their debut at a Shannons round.. and that’s a state level category.

CAMS copped a lot of flack two years ago when they cut a swathe through the number of categories racing at a national level, the after effects of which are still being felt amongst those who own Saloon Cars or Formula 3s especially.

But one of their smarter decisions of late was to, at least initially, stop someone setting up a stand-alone TCR category here.

The market is just too fractured and too thinly spread to support the inclusion of yet another class that doesn’t add dramatically to the diversity of the sport.

The potential of a new Formula 5000 class makes sense because there is currently no top-level ‘wings and slicks’ category here.

But we’ve got three tiers of Touring Car racing going along quite nicely, plus a Production Car series that is slowly building in strength with cars that ultimately won’t be far removed from the performance levels TCR offers.

There may be a market to sell TCR cars in Australia, which is part of the reason Audi Customer Sport Racing has a car here and has been pumping out the PR about it recently. But is it enough to put 16 cars on track? 16 is, by the way, absolutely the bare minimum number to run a commercially viable category at a national level these days if you hope to run it without charging $5,000 entry fees or spending your own cash to underwrite it.

I would argue, and I feel like I have a reasonable understanding of the local market, there is not.

I should add, I’m not opposed to the idea of TCR, especially given my long allegiance to GT3 racing on which the category is based.

The idea of a Touring Car category not driven by Manufacturer involvement (hello, DTM) but one that still involves them in the homologation process, and therefore the promotion of the category, is a good one and is the reason it’s worked around the world.

The cars look cool, seem to race well and are certainly affordable given you can pick one up for under $200K.

Having said that, a quick chat to our friends at the V8 Sleuth suggest you can pick up a car that could win the Kumho V8 Touring Car Series for much less than that.

I also don’t have an issue with the cars running as a niche’ class within an existing series, be it in the GT Trophy series, as speculated, or even the Australian (GT) Endurance Championship.

A spot within the Liqui-Moly Bathurst 12 Hour makes perfect sense especially if it can bring half-a-dozen cars in from the Asia Pacific region or further abroad. The cars fit the race.

Adding to the diversity of existing categories or key events and helping them build numbers so it becomes more financially viable and more appealing to punters and TV audiences is absolutely a good idea.

Running as a stand-alone category in some of the toughest conditions the Motorsport market has ever operated in – and if you don’t believe me, go and talk to any category manager operating at a national level at the moment – is absolutely not.

At the moment there’s a more realistic chance of a stand-alone GT4 category happening in Australia before TCR gets off the ground here.

And though I only speak for myself, I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one who’d rather see a KTM X-Bow racing an AMG GT, than a two-litre Audi S3 racing a very similar SEAT.

Interesting times ahead..

WORDS & IMAGES: Richard Craill