Australasian FX SBK Championship To Focus On Winton Extravaganza; Creek and Wakefield cancelled
After a very successful inaugural Australian Formula Xtreme Championship this year Australian Road & Track Rider Promotions has been looking forward to running the upcoming December Summer series. In the last few days after being in direct contact with the majority of the competitors who have competed in this year’s winter series one thing has become pretty clear and that is since our final Eastern Creek AFX Championship round of the year the majority of racers were not in a financial position to compete in a three round series at this time. What we repeatedly heard from quite a number of competitors was would we look at cutting back on the number of rounds to just one for 2010. And nearly everyone said exactly the same thing and that is the one race meeting that they were excited about and really interested in was the Winton day/night double header with road racing on the Saturday and motocross on both the Saturday and Sunday at the same venue.
As the majority of competitors we have spoken with said that is what they were interested in doing and they could not afford a three round series we have decided as of late yesterday afternoon collectively to focus all of our energy into the Winton spectacular for 2010 and make the Australasian FX-Superbike Championship a one round championship.
While nearly everyone we spoke with agreed that the Summer racing was a great concept and long overdue ARTRP understands there is little point putting on a three round series that few can afford to compete in given it has been a hard year for many so we have listened to the competitors.
On the plus side now the FX-Superbike road racing championship will be run in a similar format as both the Junior and Senior AMXC Championships which will be run and won on the same weekend. So with the revised format there will be one big day of racing for each championship on the same weekend, just as the Australian Road Racing Championships used to be a number of years ago. Consolidating the championship to one weekend opens the door for quite a few other competitors who were not in a position to do a three round series and quite a few we have spoken with like the idea of racing in both the road racing championship on the Saturday and the AMX on the Sunday.
The Winton extravaganza will still receive the excellent television coverage on SBS Speedweek and Fox SPEED channel with every class getting its share of TV. While it is with a great deal of disappointment that we have had to go down this path at this time, we have established that the Summer series concept is a great idea and that we will evolve further over time. So at this point we are moving forward and are very much looking towards putting on a huge weekend of Australasian Championship racing at Winton on the 18th and 19th of December with a Junior AMX Championship to be run and won on the Saturday, the Australasian FX-Superbike Championship to be run and won on the Saturday with racing on up until 8:00 pm in the evening and the Senior Australasian AMX Championship run on the Sunday.
The general feedback we are getting from competitors in both MX and road racing leads us to believe that the Winton end of year MX and Road Racing extravaganza will in all likelihood become one of those ‘must do’ events on the racing calendar. If anyone has any questions or would like to speak with me about this I invite everyone to call me directly on my mobile on 0419 448 452.
Cheers,
Terry O’Neill