A common topic around the ‘traps’ is that main stream media doesn’t pay enough attention to Kiwi motorsport. Not enough column inches is the tune!
Bizarrely, in my local daily on Monday, the sports section had the headline ‘Fittipaldi to retire‘ and had the following paragraph.
Christian Fittipaldo plans to retire from driving after the Rolex 24 at Daytona. The 47-year-old Brazillian racer announced the decision yesterday at Road America. “My relationship with my family, my daughter, my age, so its the package. It’s not one thing,” Fittipaldi said. “It’s not that I went out there, had a huge accident and said, ‘Whoa, now I’m afraid of doing this. I can’t do this anymore.”
Why is this bizarre? Well two Kiwi drivers were battling at Sydney Motorsport Park on Saturday night in a hugely successful Supercars race. Nick Cassidy finished second in the Super GT Series in Japan and there was no mention of either. Neither was there any mention of Earl Bamber who was competing at Road America, or Liam Lawson in F4 at the Nurburgring in Germany or Conrad Clark in F4 in the USA.
As far as I know, Christian Fittipaldi has no connection with Kiwi motorsport, yet he has filled a gap in the paper that should have highlighted some of the impressive results of Kiwi drivers’ over the weekend.
Fittipaldi does have quite an impressive career including driving for F1 teams Minardi (1992-93) and Footwork Ford (1994), CART (1995-2002), A1GP in 2005/06 (NZ didn’t have a round in that season), 24 Hours of Daytona (winning in 2004, 2014 and 2018), 24 Hours of Le Mans (2006-2008), IMSA and the NASCAR Winton Cup Series.
The problem is that to make motorsport column inches, one has to deliver them on a plate to the main stream media. Of all the Kiwi’s competing over the weekend, some of the high profile drivers have no one managing their media back home (or anywhere), while others don’t get their releases out on time, or just don’t send them to the right people.
Ross MacKay covered a lot of this in his article ‘Rugby and the media money go-round‘.
He raised the point about Motorsport NZ having a media division and ‘borrowing a leaf out of Rugby NZ’s (obviously well-thumbed) media ‘book’’.
I’m not sure whether it is up to them or not, or the responsibility of top sport people. Some just don’t realise there is a contingent of followers back home wanting to know how their weekend went.
Well, we now know that Fittipaldi is retiring!
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