A1 racing has gone very quiet since it was launched earlier this year. What happened to all the noise asks Justin Hynes
It arrived three months ago with a resounding bang. Half a world away in Brazil Fernando Alonso was racing towards his first Formula One world championship but in a motorsport rich corner of Kent, upwards of 70,000 paying customers were oblivious to the Spaniard's efforts to become F1's youngest ever champion. They were at Brands Hatch to usher in a new dawn - the world cup of motorsports. Twenty-odd teams, each representing their home country, with a single driver at their disposal racing for the honour of their flags. With A1 your reason for being there was simple. Support your national driver. And Ireland was a part of it.
As the Jordan name entered its final months in F1, Irish interest in top-level motorsport got a new home in A1 Team Ireland, spearheaded by ex-Jordan men Mark Gallagher as team principal and Ralph Firman as driver. Backed by Dublin entrepreneur Mark Kershaw and bolstered by the presence of young Dublin driver Michael Devaney as reserve pilot, Irish fans had a team to root for once more.
And at Brands Hatch the idea worked. A huge crowd, enticed by the competitive admission fees, saw Nelson Piquet Jr take victory in the feature race amid what all fair weather motorsport watchers expect from a day at the races - carnage, chaos and a lot of overtaking.
Since then though, that bang has turned to a whimper. After the fanfare there was little news. The series packed its bags for two more European rounds, in Germany and Portugal, and then disappeared to the far side of the world for rounds in Australia, Malaysia and Dubai. What had been a gloriously successful start apparently faded into nothingness and criticism.
There were mutterings about unattractive racing, a preponderance of inexperienced rookies, slow cars and poorly thought out support programmes for the races. But ask those involved in the Irish project and they tell a different story, one of a series that like the team itself, is finding its feet, learning by its mistakes and establishing a presence which it can build on in the future.
Twenty-year-old Michael Devaney, who, because Ralph Firman was committed to racing in Japan, opened Ireland's account with a point on the team's debut at Brands. He climbed into the cockpit again in Australia in early November, scoring points in the sprint race which runs before the main event and reckons that the series can only get better.
"It's true that the crowds aren't there yet," he said. "In Sydney there was a crowd of about 36,000, which is good, but in Malaysia there was hardly anyone there. But that is partly down to the programme that was put on. In Australia there was a really good support package, in Malaysia hardly anything. And you have to remember that there really isn't any culture of motorsport in places like that."
A1 is trying to build that.
"What it really needs is to have a good promoter putting the race programmes together in each country. At Brands and Eastern Creek (in Sydney) they knew what they were doing. In other places, it's ... less successful."
Devaney's senior partner, Ralph Firman, agrees. "It's a really good little series, which is trying to grow," he explains. "The problem we have is that everyone continually compares it to Formula One. It is a completely different thing to F1. It is a really good championship but it needs to be taken on its own merits."
Getting television audiences is key to the growth of a series that races in so many different countries.
A1 has secured TV deals in many of the regions represented on its grid.
So far the figures look encouraging, with A1 Team Ireland saying that 8 million people across 120 countries watched recent events. But that's just 66,000 per event, per country, fine in a small territory like Ireland, where the high profile but equally niche MotoGP gets a solid 100,000 viewers.
But if that figure is expanded to the UK or France or the US then the series has a long way to go.
For A1 Team Ireland, however, the more immediate concern is to accumulate points. The season so far has been a mixed bag with increasingly good qualifying positions, culminating in a third-place start in Malaysia, often not translating into points finishes.
"We had a lot of bad luck," insists Firman. "We had a fuel pump failure in one race and a gearbox problem at the next. Nothing to do with the team, those are A1 problems as they look after the cars, but that's the way it's developed. We've had some other good performance we perhaps haven't capitalised on as we should have but it's getting better. I finished second in Malaysia and hopefully we've got ourselves sorted out now.
"We definitely took time to adjust," he adds. "The team was put together very late, very close to the start of the season, so it has taken time to get up and running but it's working really well now. I'm in the car now for the rest of the season so there's still plenty to play for."