TALK to anyone involved in marketing these days, especially those involved in selling professional sports, and they’ll bang on until they are dry in the throat about the need to ‘find new audiences’.

The continual drive to access new potential fanbases and attract viewers yet to fully engage with any chosen game, league, team or contest, is all-encompassing and sometimes comes at the cost of looking after the fanbase that already exists.

And yet it strikes me that there is a much easier way of doing it, though it does require somewhat longer-term thinking than a well-executed Facebook ad campaign.

It’s called ‘having kids’.

In my experience, the most surefire way of getting someone hooked on the sport you love is to fully immerse them into it from the day they were born. Certainly, that was the reason I fell in love with Motorsport at a young age.

In a recent, absolutely non-scientific survey I conducted among my own colleagues, every single one of them was at least a second-generation car racing enthusiast. Most of them had links further back.

The reason I grew up a Peter Brock disciple is the same as why one of my other friends is a (clearly misguided) supporter of Collingwood in the AFL – we both grew up knowing nothing else.

So, while sports marketers run around madly trying to tap into new demographics in a bid to have them spend money on motorsport, it seems much more logical and economical to spend that time and money encouraging people who already like the sport to have kids and bring them up enjoying it as well.

Sadly, this is not something that our sport has done particularly well.

The footy codes are supremely adept at getting young fans engaged, mainly because stick-and-ball sports are much easier for a three-year-old to participate in than a go-kart race. I’d also argue that sports mascots – superbly entertaining leading a footy team out onto the field – just look creepy wandering around merchandise alley at Bathurst.

Fortunately, a colleague of mine has taken steps to remedy this interesting problem.

He’s done it by producing his own line of motorsport-themed books aimed at the little tackers that will hopefully grow up into the next group of fans – fans who will continue to pay for overpriced tickets that enable them to spend a day sitting getting drunk at the top of Mount Panorama, not actually watching much car racing but enjoying it none the less.

Dubbed ‘Little Heroes’, author Grant Rowley’s series of five books chronicles the stories of five Australasian motor racing greats; Bathurst legends Peter Brock, Dick Johnson, John Bowe and Jim Richards and rally ace Molly Taylor.

A product of last years’ initial Coronavirus lockdown, the books are brightly illustrated and contain just enough words – creatively written – to tell the story of each hero in question. From Brock’s nine Bathurst wins to Richards’ infamous Bathurst podium, it is all there, just in a form that my three-year-old nephew will find engaging.

He’d better, anyway, because he’s getting the full set for his birthday later this year.

It is a genius idea – one that I suspect every other person in the motorsport industry here wishes they had come up with – and I suspect they’ll sell like anything.

The beauty of these books is that should the first run be successful, the potential for subsequent issues is almost limitless thanks to the breadth and depth of our sport and its history. There’s something for every grown-up racing fan in our sport so it stands to reason that there’s something that will delight every little fan as well.

Best of all, they are a simple and I suspect effective way of engaging the next generation of racing fans while they are young.

In the same way that the little (I was once, I swear) version of yours truly would spend hours pouring over my old man’s car racing picture books and magazines as a kid – not really understanding much about it but loving it all the same – these books should grab the attention of young minds.

It may be a long burn, but if that sets said youth in question on a path to becoming one of the next generation of long-term, deeply invested racing fans like I am and like you probably are, then I’d argue a $20 investment in a kids book makes for a much more sensible investment than a blow-in spectator found via a Facebook ad.

Casual fans and new audiences are great, but the heart of motorsport is built on the fans who have been there since their beginning and their parents beginning and even beyond that.

They’re the fans we realty need to cultivate. These ‘Little Heroes’ should do just that.   

Check them out at the V8 Sleuth bookshop now.