Asian Motor Sports

The Formula One World Championship is, and has been the ultimate traveling circus. (with sincerest apolgies to Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Baily)

The F1 Circus criss-crosses the world from Europe to parts of Asia, to south of the equator and Australia. Then on to North America and South America all in the span of seven months. As a general rule F1 and those that make it all happen do it without a single hitch. As the acknowledged experts that’s as it should be.

Not so with others that have delved into the “fly-away” world of auto racing.

Just this month the Australian V8 Supercar Series held their second ever event in Bahrain. The cars and equipment arrived on time the day before the scheduled opening of practice. On the trip from the airport to the track one transporter carrying two of the series’ top contenders were involved in a road accident. Luckily, the damage to the race cars while troubling wasn’t to an extent it impacted the teams on track performance.

This week another traveling series has run into trouble. Previously all the WTCC events were held within the EU. The last few years the WTCC Championship has held its final event on the fast Guia street course of the Macau (PRC) Grand Prix.

As background, this years championship still has 6 contenders within striking distance, (Andy Priaulx for Chevy, Augusto Farfus and Jörg Müller for BMW, Yvan Muller for SEAT, James Thompson for Alfa Romeo and Nicola Larini for Chevy) all without the “benefit” of, ahem… a Chase.

However, travel problems have led the FIA and series organizers to delay testing from Thursday to Friday (local time, Wednesday and Thursday evening EST). Free practice and qualifying will be held on Saturday with the final race as previously scheduled on Sunday.

Maybe.

At this writing (Wednesday 17:00 EST) several teams, including BMW Schnitzer, Ravaglia Motorsport, SEAT and Proteam have not received their equipment yet. The containers with the equipment plus all the tires from Yokohama are stuck in Singapore.

Not a bad place to be stuck if your a sailor that’s been at sea for a while. For a race team… not so much.

In addition to the FIA WTCC event the 54^th running of the Macau Grad Prix also has on tap the 41^st edition of the Macau Motorcycle Grand Prix, Porsche Carrera Cup Asia, Polytec Formula 3 Macau Grand Prix and several lower tier events.

How the current WTCC problems effect the remainder of the schedule is unknown but I suspect FIA officials are burning up the phone lines to Singapore’s Changi Airport trying to expedite movement of the effected cars and equipment.