Welcome to a new year of V8X and all the excitement and uncertainty of a new championship. As you see V8X has freshened itself up a little for 2003 but this is nothing like the changes AVESCO, TEGA and V8 Supercars look set to go through in the next 12 months.

You would have to be either very new to the sport or just not paying attention if you hadn't heard by now about the changes to just about everything including sponsors, parity, event format, points, testing and teams.

The amount of change is the one reason why I believe this year will be remembered for a very long time. The start of it was the announcement in December 2002 that VB was one of the new co-sponsors with the Supercars, now known as the 2003 V8 Supercar Championship Series brought to you by Victoria Bitter.

And if all this silly season stuff wasn't enough to make you believe that off-seasons don't exist anymore, AVESCO announced a deal had been done to have a round of the Supercars in Shanghai, China, of all places!

No-one saw this coming, no gossip on the website forums where even the wildest rumours get more than they deserve. This hit so many people like a smack in the head partly because nobody in their wildest dreams thought about China. I mean, we're only Australia and there are so many people over there, 60 times our population. I reckon Tony Cochrane has taught us all a few lessons - think big and think differently.

Who hasn't said or heard "heck I'd love to sell this stuff in the US- you'd make a bundle", but when you look at China the reality of how massive this market is for V8 Supercars is mind-boggling.

The population of China is 1.2 billion, that's 1,200,000,000 potential fans.

So here's something to get your minds around. Australia's population is around 20 million, so 1% equals 200,000 people. In China 1% equals 12 million heads. Shanghai alone has around 20 million people, and that makes the potential for V8 Supercars staggering.

Still, China doesn't happen until 2004 and a year in this sport is a long time. There is a lot happening now to keep those juices flowing. But I can't help but wonder what a Chinese version of V8X would look like...?

Cheers

Big Hair Nev