Features 11 Apr 2017

Industry Insight: Swann Super Series' Terry O'Neill

Australasian Superbike Championship promoter on Sydney's opener.

The new-look Swann Super Series took off at Sydney Motorsport Park last weekend, where rounds one and two of the Australasian Superbike Championship was hosted. CycleOnline.com.au got in touch with series promoter Terry O’Neill to discuss the new format and how things went at the season-opening event.

Image: Keith Muir.

The opening rounds appeared to be a success. How was the weekend from your perspective?

Look, it was really good and from memory it was our largest race meeting as far as the grid goes since about 2008. It started off with large numbers, which was a really good thing. You know, we’ve made a lot of changes this year to the formats, staffing, the way we do things and, in some ways, we’ve gone back to the drawing board. There were a few teething problems, but by the end of the weekend we’d pretty much got it sorted and we had an excellent race meeting.

Although lacking the factory team entries, the rider numbers ended up over 140 from memory. Is that more than you were expecting?

No, I always knew that if I made the changes that I had then I would go back to the original big numbers. It’s actually roughly what I expected and my budgets for the year have 140 riders, believe it or not, that I’d set at the end of last year when I decided to look at going down this path. Am I surprised by the numbers? No. That’s what I expected we would get once we went back to being what I’d being saying for the past two years, is a proper privateer series. That’s what the original Formula Xtreme series was always about, being a privateer series, and at the end of the day the factory teams come and go. The reality is that they come when they want, they go when they want and the original format always used to work incredibly well and it is again.

What struck me in looking at the livestream and also some images we’ve had come through, was the presentation of the riders, especially in the Superbike class. It was particularly good and there was quality racing as well…

Absolutely. The reality is that in Australia, 99 out of 100 people who own a motorcycle wouldn’t know a first-time D-grader from a factory Superbike rider – they don’t know names and all they know is that they’re interested in racing and would like to see it or they don’t. It’s not rocket-science. On the weekend, these are the privateers and the guys who actually pay their own way, and more than likely on average can’t afford to compete against factory teams with seven-digit budgets. It’s the same basic principal that we’ve always had, which is affordable, level playing-field racing that’s fun. I went into this with an open mind and it might not of proved to be popular, but I thought it would and it’s proven so far that the concept has legs. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 1990s or today, it’s still a strong concept and it works well. I’m very happy with where we’re at at this stage in the cycle and there are a few things that we need to improve upon, but we’ll get on top of that very quickly. We will keep on building on this and I look forward to Queensland.

Image: Keith Muir.

In some ways the Swann Super Series is more of a streamlined, grassroots type of championship now, but then again it is commercially valuable for racers. Is that still an important aspect for the privateers?

100 percent. The privateers are the ones who need as big a helping hand as anyone else, they need the support of exposure. I spoke to one of the sponsors in a meeting a few months back and they said ‘why don’t you get rid of the television? You could save a fortune’. I said to them that what the television does for us at present is lets the privateers actually sell themselves, gives them something to sell as the stars – and they are the stars. In the Superbike class there were four or five guys at the front battling it out and, as I say, for over 90 percent of people watching in television, all they will see is guys racing and battling it out. Guess what? By the end of this year there will be a whole lot of new names of people that motorcycle enthusiasts who watch racing will know as names of competitive racers. They will be the ones that star in our series. Our series is still shown overseas, broadcast around the world and the exposure the series gets is second to none. In actual fact, we have more hours of free-to-air television, more hours of pay TV and just as much livestreaming as any other series. It’s a good thing for the privateers and everything I’ve always done has been aimed at looking after the privateer competitor.

The weekend was the first event using this year’s three-event, six-round structure. Do you think that will be here to stay for the longer-term?

Maybe, but more than likely not. I think that next year we will go to a four-event, eight-round structure, but for this year the way the economy is right now, things are tough and things are tight. We’ve spaced out three events and Queensland will be one trip away from New South Wales, where the majority of competitors come from, and it’s up to Queensland in the middle of winter – what else would you really want? What this is allowing is for people to compete in a national level series with massive electronic exposure and it’s affordable. I think the format has legs and, you know what, I should have went away from the six-event format two years ago. Back then I had the factory teams and they wanted that kind of format or more in general, so I used to fight against that, but I should have went away from the six-event calendar a couple of years ago. I thought it would’ve been a mistake, but really it was a mistake not to do it and it meant that a lot of competitors couldn’t afford to do it. If you have a look at a lot of names over the weekend, they’re people who used to race with us three or four years ago and they’ve come back! If you walked around and talked to them on the weekend, the ones I spoke to anyway, all seemed pretty happy. That makes it all worthwhile, if the competitors go home tired and dizzy from turning left and right a lot [laughs], with a big smile on their face.

Just to wrap things up, was there any one thing personally that you enjoyed the most?

Well, the thing that I had hoped for and the thing that actually stood out was how great the racing was, how ferocious it was. The guys at the front, it didn’t matter in what class, it looked spectacular and that’s all it has to do. I mean, apart from one race in Superbikes, they were all over each-other and that’s the closest Superbike racing I’ve seen for a couple of years, with four or five bikes at the front battling it out. It just looked good, so that to me means it was the success of the event.

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