MOTORSPORT: Falcon's slide clouds V8 Supercar future

As sales of Ford's road car flagship Falcon plummet, motorsport correspondent Geoffrey Harris wonders what it means for its racing future - and for V8 Supercars

Commodore may be left without a racetrack rival

Comment

The V8 Supercar season proper begins this week with Adelaide's Clipsal 500, so it's timely to consider the state of things -- the big picture in and around Australia's major motorsport category.

Sale of a majority stake in V8 Supercars Australia appears imminent, with a short list of supposedly three serious buyers prepared to pay a price that would value the total business at 200, 300 or even 400 million dollars despite sliding TV and track audiences in recent seasons.

It is almost a year since the Car of the Future project was unveiled. Pretty much all of what was announced that day was already known, but to date no new manufacturers have declared they will be starters in the category.

Indeed, engine rules for any new manufacturers -- due on June 30 last year -- still have not been announced.

So it remains a Holden Commodore versus Ford Falcon series for the immediate future.

And what of the future, especially if the Car of the Future does not entice any other makes?

The Falcon has been Ford's flagship Australian vehicle for half a century, but Falcon sales in the first two months of this year plummeted 43.5 per cent on what they were in January-February last year.

Last month Ford sold only 1572 Falcon sedans. That was less than half Holden's sales of 3829 Commodores.

The Commodore figure represented a drop of 2.2 per cent on the same month last year.

But the Ford figure for February was a 37.5 per cent plunge from a year earlier.

And that came in only the second full month after Ford won the 2010 V8 Supercar Championship, with Dick Johnson/Jim Beam Racing and driver James Courtney.

The old adage of "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" is well and truly a thing of the past.

Before this latest drop, Falcon sales had already shrunk from 73,220 in 2003 to 29,516 last year.

So whose job is it to sell the road cars -- the race team(s), the manufacturer, or the manufacturer's dealers?

Surely it is the job of the race teams to win on the racetrack and for the manufacturer, primarily, and its dealers to leverage that success.

Now matters may not have been helped in this latest instance by Courtney opting  to switch to the Holden Racing Team rather than remain within the Ford "family" this season.

And it may have been complicated a little more by DJR not being Ford's main team -- that's Ford Performance Racing -- and even more so recently by the news that Dick Johnson will drive a Chevrolet Corvette -- a car made by General Motors, the parent of Holden! -- in next month's Targa Tasmania.

But whoever's responsibility it is to sell Falcons, last year's championship has not translated into sales.

So grim are things at Ford that workers at its factories in Victoria have been scaled back to three-day weeks at the minute.

Holden and GM are committed to a new model Commodore, the VF, due in 2014, but there is a big question mark over the future of the Falcon.

Few road-going Commodores and Falcons these days are sold with V8 engines in them, but now Ford is preparing to downsize from its traditional six-cylinder motor  to fit a four-cylinder engine to what it will call an EcoBoost Falcon.

Certainly Ford buyers have shown a fondness for more fuel-efficient cars -- the imported, smaller Focus and Fiesta helped it show improved sales overall in the first two months of the year, despite buyers deserting the locally-made Falcon.

But a four-cylinder Falcon is moving even further away from what has formed the basis of the Ford V8 Supercar.

Unless the slide in Falcon sales can be arrested, and soon, doubts will only increase about whether it can retain a place in the Australian car market beyond another three or four years.

It is looking an endangered species. And if the Falcon goes from the Ford line-up that will leave only one type of V8 Supercar, the Holden Commodore -- unless a new manufacturer appears.

Adelaide's Clipsal 500 is renowned for heat, and especially the heat that drivers have to endure in their race cars.

Holden won the opening two races in Abu Dhabi last month -- one by Courtney, the other by the dominant driver of recent seasons, Jamie Whincup, who Ford also lost (along with Craig Lowndes) when Team Vodafone/Triple Eight Race Engineering switched from the blue oval to the red lion last season.

So there's extra heat on Ford and its teams this week, and this season, to do what they can towards saving the Falcon -- if racing can do anything anymore to secure its future, or if there is any future for it, as either a road car or race car.