NEWS that TCR’s Australian and New Zealand series will share the same promoter is a breath of fresh-air for those who hunger for some real Trans-Tasman Motorsport rivalry.

WORDS & IMAGES: Richard Craill

FOR DECADES and decades Australia and New Zealand have shared a similar racing culture yet have enjoyed very little cross-over.

Oh sure, we’ve had drivers: Jim Richards, Greg Murphy, Shane van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin have made a habit of coming over here and stealing our biggest trophies. And so they should because those Kiwi steerers are generally a very talented bunch.

And yet, they’ve never been able to do it in cars from their own country.

As good as it is having Australian drivers take on Kiwi drivers in Supercars, open wheelers or otherwise, it would be better if Kiwi cars could come here and race the same specification cars on Aussie tarmac. And vice-versa.

Driver-versus-driver is great but adding cars into the equation just seems to make it feel more.. real. More like a nation-versus-nation team thing.

It’s not like there have been chances, either: Australia decided (questionably) that we’d rather have F4 over TRS and that our 86 series would be a slightly different specification than theirs. And, of course, our Touring Car worlds haven’t aligned since the halcyon days of the Group A era and the 1980s Wellington street races.

In TCR, however, we have a savior for trans-Tasman competition on four wheels, potentially as intense, competitive and feisty as it is in Cricket, Rugby, Netball and any other sport that the Kiwi’s regularly beat us in.

News that a division of ARG, the company promoting the still brand-new TCR Australia series, would head up operations for the still-to-come New Zealand series has to be seen as a breath of fresh air.

Further talk that they are in the planning stages for a potential Tasman series is even better. Finally we’ve got one promoter on each side of the Tasman, promoting the same product and with the same goals and ambitions.

TCR New Zealand will launch in early 2020, running a compact series over the summer alongside TRS before a series of longer-distance races later in the year.

The fact that the Australian and New Zealand calendars run in different seasons is like a message from above commanding that ‘You will race together!’.

Just imagine a TCR Tasman Series where the best from here and there can go at it in a couple of properly competitive races that either stand on their own, or take in the best bits of the respective domestic calendars.

The potential for that to become a cornerstone of TCR racing in the region, drawing from not only the two local markets but from regions further afield in Asia, is significant.

But even if that takes a few years to get really pumping the cross pollination of the two series will be a win-win for many anyway.

Teams will be able to amortise the cost of their vehicles by using them for twelve months of the year – running them in both series if they choose to get maximum bang for their buck. Compared to Australia, the Kiwi series is more condensed so teams could quite feasibly send their cars over for the Aussie summer. And vice-versa during their winter.

Then there’s the drivers. TCR Australia has attracted a diverse bunch of drivers, split nicely between those just out of a Supercars seat to those looking for one – with a smattering of those doing it for kicks thrown in for good measure.

But for young drivers with budget, being in a car as often as possible is key so it would become a no-brainier to add a five-round TCR New Zealand campaign onto the seven or eight rounds likely for Australia in 2020.

And again, it works both ways. Mechanics can keep busy all year round. Sponsors or those invested in it can leverage an investment on both sides of the water and so on.

But perhaps most importantly, the two series’ guided by the same competition and commercial goals will be good for the sport. The messages will be the same, the ideals the same and the marketing effort and promotion – based on what has been done already in the Australian series – will hopefully be just as on-point.

Which means the sport will grow, more people will watch and engage with it which can only be a good thing.

And if even a tiny element of the passion Australian fans get from beating New Zealand teams, and Kiwi fans get from beating Aussies, seeps into a trans-Tasman TCR campaign then it will be a very good thing indeed.

After years of being close but ultimately oh-so-far apart, the two closest of motorsport neighbours in the world are beating down the fence. And it has the potential to be great.

And that’s before we even bring up the fact that TCRs promoters are also behind a big-banger open wheel series, too..

This is an edited version of a column that first ran on Talk Motorsport, a New Zealand website with very similar story telling ideals as our own. Check them out right here – https://talkmotorsport.co.nz/