Supercars boss James Warburton has branded the Hampton Downs 101 as a ‘niche sport’ ahead of this weekend’s event in north Waikato.
Millionaire Tony Quinn is bank rolling the upcoming Australian GT Endurance Series event at his track, which is just one week before the Supercars round just up SH1 in Pukekohe.
To have two motor racing events so close to each other, geographically and on the calendar, is unusual and Quinn has said his GT series is the one with an exciting future.
But Warburton says the Supercars event is where there will be exciting and competitive races, involving high profile drivers.
“It’s a niche sport,” Warburton said.
“The thing with GT racing is it’s completely different, it’s a gentleman’s category.
“It’s an enthusiasts based thing and it doesn’t have the magnitude of a major race series.”
In a recent interview with Fairfax Media, Quinn took a swipe at Supercars, saying it’s a category in decline and was critical that some Supercars drivers not being allowed to compete at Hampton Downs.
“They’re almost restrictive in what they’ll let the drivers do, because they obviously don’t want GT to devalue the V8 category,” Quinn said.
“But it’s happening anyway, all they’re trying to do it stop the rot, they’ve got the stars in the cars, but they don’t have the product that appeals to anyone anymore.
“We’ve got the product that appeals to everyone, but we don’t have the stars in the cars yet.
“Although we do have Greg Murphy here.”
But while there will be some impressive looking cars at Hampton Downs, the series doesn’t match Supercars in terms of profile and there are only four rounds to the endurance series, two in Australia and two in New Zealand.
“You look at us,” Warburton said.
“We have an accumulative TV audience of 70 million in Australia, 230 million homes globally and we’ve just cracked through 600 million Facebook impressions.
“We’re the No3 sport in Australia and are globally regarded.
“We’ve got deals in Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia that we’re finalising to work into the calendar from 2018.
“So from that perspective, it’s noise people want to create.
“We have them on our support card, but it’s just this hysteria that people want to continually want to create.
“They are always after our drivers to drive in it and our drivers always win the races, because they’re always that good.
“We had just under 120,000 over the three days last year (at Pukekohe), I believe they’re looking for about 10,000.”
While Murphy is coming out of retirement to co-drive with Quinn at Hampton Downs, the current biggest star of New Zealand motor racing, Shane van Gisbergen, will only be racing in the Supercars, as he hopes to close in on winning the 2016 championship.
Warburton says van Gisbergen’s success is lift the category’s profile to even greater heights in New Zealand.
“Shane has been a high profile driver for a long time through his results,” Warburton said.
“I think we’ll continue to get stronger in New Zealand and key to our cars is that there’s nothing like them.
“They are incredibly quick, they’re difficult to drive, they’re loud and you can see from the action that this is an incredibly competitive category, where people are rubbing doors.
“We prefer not to see big accidents, but we’ve had our share of them in the last two races.
That’s what it’s about, the drama, excitement and entertainment.
“We’re high octane entertainment and having those rivalries, like Shane and Jamie (Whincup) in the Red Bull team and Scotty (McLaughlin) and Fabian (Coulthard) going head to head next year.”
