How the eSportes revolution will help the sport

WHAT did you think of the first Supercars eSeries event held on Wednesday night?

For many that watched it, myself included, it was probably the best two hours of entertainment since the Covid-19 related lockdown started weeks ago.

It may not have been ‘real’ racing, but it looked like it, sounded like it and had all the vibe of watching a real-life Supercars race.

Supercars chucked everything and the kitchen sink at their first foray into running a pro eSeries with their full field of pro drivers – the broadcast was every bit the full production, Neil Crompton was commentating and it was broadcast live on Fox Sports in Australia, Sky in New Zealand and a host of streaming outlets as well.

The racing was predictably wild, but once people started settling down it was of a high quality, especially at the front of the field.

The importance of what Supercars, like so many other categories around the world, are doing with their eSeries can’t be underestimated and it goes way beyond merely offering a few hours of mindless entertainment once a week.

Motorsport is in a unique position due to the fact it’s the only sport in the world where the real-world experience can be recreated digitally.

The key inputs – steering wheel, brake pedal, throttle pedal and gear shift – can all be replicated via a simulator and the racing simulations are now so series they accurately recreate fuel burn, tyre degradation and weather scenarios.

The skills are the same, to the point where drivers everywhere use simulators as a training tool for their real-world racing.

It’s not like a footy player can virtually kick a football or a cricketer roll their arm over in their lounge room.

But more than the opportunity motorsport must corner the sporting market for the next few months, it’s vital for the sport’s health and a key factor in ensuring that it comes out the other side in something resembling a healthy state.

Fox Sports’ live broadcast drew a very healthy audience of more than 70,000 people while the online audience was substantial – probably double that.

For sponsors spending money to be on the side of Supercars, it’s valuable exposure that they otherwise wouldn’t be getting at the moment.

I spoke to Cris Gillespie, who heads up the motor racing involvement of National Transport Insurance – the brand behind the Truck Assist sponsorship on Lee Holdsworth’s Tickford Racing Mustang, Jack LeBrocq and more.

“One big part of why we’re in Supercars is the brand awareness and getting those brands on TV with our core market and our target market and that is absolutely working, which is why we’ve ramped up our investment over the last two years in the sport. It’s great to be able to continue that during Eseries which no other sport can provide,” he said.

“Even though business done on the track isn’t happening at the moment because we’re not attending a race track, we’re still doing Zoom meetings and Google hangouts and all those things talking to partners and talking to different people we can be doing business with, so that’s still happening In the background.

“Eseries has given teams a lot to be hopeful for. Certainly, their commercial teams are fully engaged. As we’ve seen most of the racing operations have had to take some enforced leave and are spending a lot of April away from the workshop, which we can understand.

“Commercially there’s been a huge amount of engagement with the Eseries. Our business and a lot of our people, a heap of them are big Supercars fans – and if they weren’t before, they are now – they were all really pleased to see the Eseries going on – it just shows you that what having some very smart people that can manufacture ideas to life very fast, and that sort of innovation is what we need to be portraying to the big wide world outside of Supercars to show what we can do.”

It’s an interesting insight into the sport and just how important the next 10 weeks are for the sport.

Supercars has a chance to corner the sporting market in this part of the world, and their sponsors and those that are funding the teams are the ones that will benefit the most.

While the football codes battle for survival and have zero opportunity to showcase their codes, the advent of eSports will hopefully leave motorsport in a better position than others when this remarkable situation ends and we can go back to racing in the real world..