After the first round I thought that the season had gotten boring - don't get me wrong, not in the racing department but in between the races. There was a severe lack of news and happenings, that was until Phillip Island. There was more emotion flying around than you could poke a stick at and some of it was pretty heated with Bargs' big prang. Some people reckon it was 'poor form' confronting Murph on the grid but Bargs believed that the incident, which could have been life-threatening, warranted some reaction. I thought he was pretty restrained considering he probably felt like snapping him.

A lot of other stuff happened, from Ambrose crossing the line ahead of Skaife and Bright in race one then dropping the ball in race two, to Skaife and Kelly getting fined around $2000 each for not wearing their Dunlop caps on the podium!!

It certainly took everybody's mind off the traction control debate. I reckon part of the reason behind the murmurs about traction control is that a lot of people had nothing else to talk about. Phillip Island changed that, and if you are like me and check out some of the forums going around on my Internet browser then you will see that the dreaded 'TC' hardly rated a mention just after Phillip Island.

This leads me to another subject about the growth of the sport. One fact about V8 Supercar is that the sport isn't happening every weekend like AFL or NRL. Yeah, it gets coverage on the weekends of a race meeting (thought I think some sections of the media could give it a bit more air time and column inches) but outside Network Ten's commitment, there is stuff all.

Apart from generating greater exposure on a race weekend the industry needs to look at ways to keep the sport in the eye of the consumer between events. In some cases that means sustaining some sort of exposure for up to three weeks, sometimes even a month, between race meetings.

Now I'm not saying to everybody to get on AVESCO's case and start firing emails at them with their own opinion on how things should be done - if anybody outside of the teams themselves wants the sport to move on, it's AVESCO.

But surely there are more avenues to promote the personalities of the drivers away from events. The stress from certain quarters on the weekend really brought out some of those personalities. It's up to you, the fans, to decide whether you like them or not. One thing is for sure, a couple of drivers won't be in too much of a hurry to sit next to each other at the next autograph session.

Cheers

Big Hair Nev