27/03/2007
NEWS STORY
 |
After almost two seasons of trying, Team Great Britain finally took its first A1 Grand Prix win on Sunday, with Oliver Jarvis taking a well-deserved win in Mexico City ahead of teams USA and South Africa. Earlier in the day, former F1 driver Alex Yoong claimed victory in the Sprint Race.
After the scenes at Brands Hatch in late 2005 when the crowd erupted as Team Great Britain took the (short lived) lead, ahead of Australia and Brazil, one might have expected some reaction in response to Sunday's victory. However, the silence was deafening.
Other than dedicated websites such as Pitpass, race fans were hard put to find news of the weekend's event, far less media celebration of Jarvis' win.
Ironically, the victory - indeed the race weekend - didn't get a mention in The Sun or The Times, both newspapers part of the same Murdoch empire that owns Sky, the TV broadcaster which has the (live) rights to A1 GP in the UK.
It is unclear what sort of future A1 GP has, but on current evidence it doesn't bode well.
Following Jarvis' win, there is sure to be some last minute promotion of the forthcoming event at Brand Hatch, which takes place in four weeks. However, whichever way you look at it, it is a case of too little too late.
In the UK, at any rate, the decision to sell the TV rights to Sky was short-sighted, to put it mildly. There is little in the way of promotion ahead of race weekends, with the broadcaster concentrating all its efforts on football, cricket, rugby, horse racing and just about everything else.
Ignoring the obvious fact that many race fans will not pay for race coverage, there is the little matter that Sky does virtually nothing to give A1 GP events any form of advance promotion. In the movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner might have heard the mantra "if you build it, they will come", but in reality one has to know of its existence and where it is in the first place.
A1 GP took Sky's money and, based on reaction at Brands Hatch in 2005, both parties thought they'd got it made. How wrong they were.
With the Brands Hatch event taking place on a non-GP weekend, and on what should be a pleasant spring weekend, A1 GP can probably look forward to a good crowd.
However, with a bit more work, some decent promotion and a broadcaster whetting the public's appetite, think how much better it could have been.
To find out more about last weekend's A1 GP event in Mexico City - results, reports, quotes, standings and pictures - simply, click here