To race to the rescue
ganising test (drive) days. I was thinking why are we even having this conversation?
“(A1GP) later provided a list of 20 drivers who were coming for a test day. What they didn’t realise is 12 were in my phone, so I rang them and asked, ‘Are you coming to the test drive?’ and they said ‘ What are you talking about?’.
“I kept going back to key people saying, ‘ Now do you want to listen to me’.”
The answer, it would seem, was no.
FINAL COUNTDOWN Two months out, then Sports Minister Phil Reeves expressed concern to Gold Coast Motor Events Company chairman Terry Mackenroth and general manager Greg Hooton, the men ultimately charged with running the event. They told him all was OK.
“They were badly misled by A1GP , wh ich made it very difficult for them to manage the operation,” Reeves told the Bulletin this week.
Fortunately, they were gifted a Plan B. Ten days before the newly renamed SuperGP was due to start on the Gold Coast, Murray made a phone call as he drove away from another Bathurst 1000. “I rang a mate and said, ‘You need to get me an intro- duction with the Bowden family’, who owned a collection of classic race cars on the Sunshine Coast,” he said. Murray’s idea was to fill the void he knew was coming with a series of Legends races. Classic cars. Iconic drivers. The Bowdens said yes. Now he needed the drivers. “I was ringing Colin Bond, Allan Moffatt, Dick Johnson, John French – all those legends,” Murray said. “They said, ‘No worries, see you in 12 months’ and I said ‘Not next year, next week’. “The organisers rejected my idea – ‘No, A1GP is still coming’ – and a week from the event I personally wrote a cheque for $25,000 to the Bowden family so they could prepare the cars. I had to take that risk ... we needed to rescue the show.” Reeves officially authorised that rescue mission on Saturday, October 17.
With A1GP finally confirming the inevitable, Murray’s Legends concept was given the nod and Cochrane brokered an agreement with his Supercars team bosses to run four 150km races over two days. It was less than five days until the event.
GAME DAY 2009 would be the one and only Gold Coast SuperGP. It also ranks as one of the most important motorsport events in the city’s history.
“If we hadn’t performed how we did that year, that would have been the end of V8s on the Gold Coast,” Cochrane said.
“The TV network would have walked and it would have died on the vine ... but everybody did their sport proud. We had a full program that not only fulfilled the TV contract but actually rated quite well.”
Then there were the sport’s toughest critics.
“What really saved the event was the amount of people who came,” Reeves said of the 200,000 fans. “They loved it and the event just kept growing in the following years.”
A lot has changed since 2009.
The Gold Coast Motor Events Company is no more, disbanded in the wake of the A1GP fiasco with Mackenroth and Hooton among the casualties. Reeves is no longer a politician. Cochrane is chairman of the Gold Coast Suns. Murray was jettisoned from his handson role after Supercars secured the rights to run the show.
As for the A1GP boss who happily accepted $1.8 million of taxpayer money and failed to deliver? “I don’t think anybody’s heard of him since,” Cochrane said of Teixeira.
One thing that hasn’t changed though is the Gold Coast continues to host a bigtime motorsport event. It’s not Indy, it’s certainly not SuperGP, but it’s still standing.
As Cochrane declared: “Right at the death knock we stepped up and pulled it off at almost impossible odds.”