Manufacturer Teams

[Stitch]

Hi Alan,

Do you think we'll ever see the amount of involvement as we did in the nineties from manufacturer teams? Looking back through my old recordings, there were a lot more teams run by manufacturers, like the Renault, Nissan, Alfa Romeo teams, etc., along with particular one-make support races like the Renault Spyder championships and Formula Vauxhall Junior and so on.

It's interesting to see that back then car sponsorship was quite big as well - for example Formula One races were frequently 'sponsored' all around the track by the Renault Laguna, or the Alfa Romeo 155 or the Ford Mondeo.

A lot of people have pointed out there is an international recession, but we had a similar depression in the early nineties under the conservative government (Black Wednesday and the like) so do you really think this is to blame? Or do you agree that car manufacturers are relying less and less on motorsport as a valid form of advertisement for their products? What do you think the future holds for the BTCC?

[Alan Gow]

Well, I'm no Economics graduate but I can assure you that the the global and UK recession we have just gone through was a helluva lot worse than the recession of the early nineties......it sure wasn't 'similar'.

You will have noticed that there is a lot less manufacturer involvement, at all levels of motorsport, than in recent memory; F1, World Rally, Sports Cars, Touring Cars and etc. Of course the global recession is a very large part of it, however I also tend to think it is cyclical - motorsport does go through periods of differing levels of manufacturer involvement from time to time, and we are also in the midst of one of those cycles.