Motorsport and the Print Media

[falcadore]

I'm currently reading Craig Lowndes' new book "The Inside Line". It's a book which essentially explains his life today (or late 2010) as a person and as modern V8 Supercar driver. A large part of the book is a translation to layman's terms of what V8 Supercar racing is. Nuts and bolts stuff, race engineering, race driving, fitness training, diet,

Comments

[miwahni]

Lack of newspaper coverage has been a problem for years and years. If we relied on the dailies we'd have no idea what was going on in V8 Supercars. As for GP, unless Mark Webber is doing well, it rarely gets a decent write-up.
It's not as if the V8s lack super-personalities. Lowndes is a case in point - he has a huge fan base, and he knows how to relate to media. Queenslanders love to read about their own and would enjoy articles about Steve Johnson. I don't understand why the media is so cold on the V8s. Luckily sponsors are good at crunching the numbers and don't rely on newspaper articles - or the lack of such - to determine where their dollars are best spent.
As for female participation - look, I'm as big a supporter of feminism as anyone, but even I have to admit that on the whole we lack that killer instinct. More of a "after you!" attitude than a go-for-the-jugular instinct. But that doesn't mean we enjoy watching any less. I'd be very interested to learn your source for your comment about audience demographics (and I'm assuming you mean tv audience).

[falcadore]

I don't have the figures to hand, they came from my memory of Australian Bureau of Statistics figures that came out last year sometime.
The one sport that did get significant female figures was Tennis. Hardly surprising really as it was the only one of the major sports depicted with significant female on screen participation. (Netball wasn't in the list).

[miwahni]

So you're saying that female participation in a sport is directly related to the amount of air-time that the female participants in a sport get?
I wonder what attracts us to any particular sport in the first place. I've grown up watching AFL (VFL!) and cricket, because these are sports that my father liked to watch (yes, he was born in Victoria). Motor racing entered the agenda when I was 10, and went to Bathurst for the first time. Standing on the mountain, feeling the ground shake as the Falcon GTHOs rumbled past, hooked me for life! So in my case it was parental influence, definitely, that got me hooked (even if I refused to follow Essendon like my father did).

[falcadore]

I'm going to have to dig the report out now. Gimme a few moments...