Unfortunately, this weeks news of Holden's demise is something we have seen coming for a while now but at the same time never imagined would actually happen.
This once great car manufacture was the dominant brand in Australia and struck passion in the hearts and souls of Aussies, nearly everyone has a story to be told of growing up with a Commodore in the driveway and unfortunately that's now truly a thing of the passed.
At the end of the day, others will replace the spot of Holden for day to day travels but what happens to one of our nations greatest sporting rivalry's and what does it mean for that said sport.
Sadly for Supercars there truly is no easy fix to this, Holden versus Ford has been the biggest factor to the growth of Supercars, Blue vs Red rivals even some of Aussie rules footy's greatest rivalry's, Come October Mount Panorama hosts 200,000+ spectators and they are there for Holden vs Ford so what now when the Red team is no more?
Rumours have it that Camaro could be the replacement to the Commodore on the grid but GM's announcement of Holden's closing stated their intentions to cease right-hand drive manufacturing so a Camaro replacement seems unlikely, other rumours are of BMW joining the grid but even that seems a massive stretch, why would the German manufacture want to spend money designing a race car that can only be used in Australia.
Both Beau and I love the Supercars platform we love the style of race-car that is raced, the high horsepower low down-force no driver aids platform is one we are very fond of , seeing such fast race-cars being raced so closely together and moving and sliding around racetracks is an amazing formula, but unfortunately its a high-cost one that lacks any real manufacture relevance any more.
To us there is only one real long term solution and that is GT3, now this might not be the most popular opinion to many and its even one we didn't want to be the solution at first but it makes sense into many ways, firstly for any series to work it takes money and lots of it so to simply put it you need manufacture support and the only way to have that is via the race cars being relevant to what customer can purchase from the showroom, GT3 has that and it has that in crazy amounts, not only are these cars faster then Supercars COTF they start as a genuine road-going chassis, and in most cases they initial purchase/build is cheaper than the COTF, one of the biggest things I like about the idea of running GT3 cars is the fact it gives our drivers international relevance it gives them valuable seat time in cars that are raced absolutely everywhere now. The Bathurst 12 hour is also a massive indicator of Aussies racing purists ability to take on GT3 cars as our own, each year the 12 hour goes from strength to strength and becomes more and more popular.
One could argue for days and days on what should be the solution but for us, it's pretty simple, as we have said above no series or teams would survive without the proper backing and to have that you need manufactures to be invested in the series and the only foreseeable way that happens in our opinion is to bite the bullet on the last 20 odd years of V8 Supercars and jump on the GT3 bandwagon and the sooner the better.
Or do Supercars manage to make the formula work without Holden, you tell us?