HOW INVOLVED WILL GRM BE IN SUPERCARS?

As a significant ARG shareholder, team owner Barry Rogers is now a shareholder in the Supercars Championship, but how involved will he be in the business of running the V8 series or returning to the series?

Rogers, team co-owner of 2000 Bathurst 1000 winning outfit Garry Rogers Motorsport, is now a partial owner of the championship.

He explained that, while he is a shareholder in the business, he will make suggestions about the Supercars Championship, while his main focus remains on the Australian Racing Group categories S5000, TCR and National Trans Am Series.

“As group, we (the Australian Racing Group) have got a fairly reasonable shareholding in the whole arrangement and representation on the board,” he said to Auto Action.

“We’ll certainly have our direction of where we want things to go and it’ll be up to the management to meet the sort of things that we think, need to be done.”

Rogers believes that not much needs to change; the ownership just needs to think about the collective rather than a specific individual.

“Not a lot needs to change. People think there are big things that need to change – it’s not big things, just little tweaks that need to happen.

“At the end of the day, when you make decisions, just think, is that in the best interests of the sport, or is it in the best interests of an individual?

“If your answer is it’s an individual, then you are making the wrong decision.

“If you make the decisions that are right by the sport, and when I say the sport, that’s the fans and the competitors, if it works for the sport that is the way to go.”

He believes control must be taken from the teams and that will allow the sport to flourish.

“There was a lot of self-interest at times that had to be managed with the teams,” he said.

“The whole show is absolutely first class – we want to get the stage that they focus on racing, and we focus on making the business run and the business thrive and if the business thrives, the teams benefit.

“If everyone focused on what they have got to do well, I think they’ll be success.”

Rogers revealed to AA it is very unlikely that he will return as a competitor in Supercars as GRM is heavily invested in the Australian Racing Group categories – S5000, TCR and National Trans Am Series.

“We’ve certainly got plenty going on at the workshop currently. Garry and I haven’t even spoken about whether we’d look at getting back into Supercars,” he said.

“We’ve always said that we’re involved in motor racing … you’d never say that could never ever happen, but I would say it’s very unlikely we’d get back into Supercars.

“I think we’ve got plenty going on with what we do in ARG categories, it’s not like you couldn’t compete in Supercars, even with some ownership of the whole thing, but I just think that really our focus, is really on our TCR cars, S5000s and Trans Ams.

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