The Ghost of ProCar

At any time, hundred of young racing drivers are plugging away in categories like Formula Renault, Formula BMW and Formula Ford, taking the first steps towards becoming professional racing drivers. In their early years, at least, most will be dreaming of F1 stardom. Most of them will fail. Despite the economic recession, there were 29 drivers on the grid at the last round of the Formula Renault championship at Donington. The odds are that, at most, maybe one of those 29 will ever make it as far as F1. Of the 20 champions that the British series has produced since 1989, just four have gone on to become Grand Prix drivers.

What, then, are the options for those convinced they have what it takes to pursue a life as a paid professional racing driver, but who has found the road to F1 closed off to them? While Formula 1 may be far and away the best paid field of motorsport apart, perhaps, from NASCAR, it is not the only way a racing driver can hope to be paid for plying his trade. There's the Indy Racing League, though it remains predominantly an oval series which perhaps isn't best suited to drivers who learned their craft on the road courses of Europe. There's sports car racing, but with the bulk of the field in both the European and American series made up of private teams backed by wealthy individuals, many of whom are to be found behind the wheel, the scope to find paid drives is limited. Audi, Peugeot and, probably Acura, will most likely be paying their drivers, but the vast majority of entrants in, for example, last weekend's Spa 1000kms, were probably paying for the privilege of being there.

There's always touring cars, although the days when the British Touring Car Championship consisted of major car manufacturers paying F1 veterans substantial money are now long gone. The World Touring Car Championship has a number of works teams and both longtime tintop specialists like Rickard Rydell, Alain Menu and Yvan Muller and ex-F1 men like Nicola Larini, Gabriele Tarquini and Tiago Monteiro. In the end, though, racing 270BHP Super2000 spec touring cars seems a terrible waste of a professional racing driver's talents. The cars have too much grip, too little power, and the results are often determined by a hideously overcomplicated equivalency formula designed to enable petrol and diesel, front wheel drive and rear wheel drive cars to compete on an equal footing.

A far more appealing option, surely, must be the DTM series, which kicked off at Hockenheim last year. Big 4 litre V8 Audis and Mercedes with nearly 500BHP on tap, which can lap a shade quicker than an F3 car, these are proper racing cars. Ex-F1 men, Mika Hakkinen, Jean Alesi and Heinz-Harald Frentzen all found a lucrative second career here, and while they have all now left, the younger Schumacher brother, Ralf, is plying his trade in a year-old Mercedes.

Among the front-runners in the series are a number of former single-seater stars whose path to F1 ran up against the buffers. Paul Di Resta, who nearly took the title last year, was the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries Crown in 2006. Jamie Green is another former Euroseries champion who never quite managed to line up a GP2 drive. Alexandre Premat wound up at Audi after winning in GP2 while Gary Paffett is yet another former F3 champion who couldn't get the backing together to carry on in single seaters. Reigning champion Timo Scheider has been a touring car man for a long time, but he too started out as a race winner in F3 and Formula Renault in the late 1990s. Compared to any other national touring car series in the world, both the quality and international flavour of the driver lineup is remarkable (there are almost as many British drivers in the series as Germans!) Tom Kristensen, who won on Sunday, has had a sportscar career which rivals that of Jackie Ickx.

And why? Because, in a way, it's not really a touring car championship at all. The series owes more than a little to the old ProCar concept. ProCar was originally a Grand Prix support-event which ran in 1979 and 1980. A single-make series for a grid full of BMW's M1s which attracted a grid full of current and recently retired F1 drivers. It is the later, stillborn late 1980s which the DTM most closely resembles, however. Bernie Ecclestone's brainchild, it involved 'silhouette' racers, with F1-derived V10 3.5l engines and carbon fibre chassis with saloon car bodywork. A single Alfa Romeo 164 Procar was built and lapped Monza very quickly, but the championship never saw the light of day.

The modern DTM race cars are, according to those who drive them, more like single seaters than conventional touring cars. As with the old ProCar concept, the saloon-car bodyshape masks a carbon fibre chassis and brakes, suspension and transmission which is much more thoroughbred racing car than modified saloon car. The championship is even, to a fair degree, international, with races in the UK, Italy, Spain and France. How much that has to do with the lack of decent racetracks in Germany is a matter for speculation...

The DTM has all the ingredients for a great race series and yet, watching the opening race at Hockenheim last weekend, I was not convinced. Yes, it didn't help that it happened to be a rather processional race. That can happen in any series, at least any where the rules are not deliberately manipulated to keep things artificially close. There was more to it than that, though. I couldn't help thinking I was watching, in essence, a high speed car advert for Mercedes and Audi.

The teams are all ultimately funded by, and operating at the behest of, these two manufacturers. When the race turned out to be something of an Audi benefit, one wondered whether the Audi drivers would really race each other as hard as they might race their Mercedes rivals. Timo Scheider tailed Tom Kristensen all race long (though Matthias Ekstrom had the race in the bag until the last moment) but never really looked like he would get past. Had Kristensen been a Mercedes man, might he have tried a little harder? Drivers with an eye on their long-term employment prospects don't risk taking their team mates off the road, and that's true across the racing world. In a series which consists, essentially, of two teams of 10 drivers, however, that can significantly stifle the racing.

My other problemwith the DTM is its use of mandatory pit stips. I know I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record on this subject, but pit stops are not, in and of themselves, interesting to watch. They break up the flow of races, make it difficult for those watching track-side to work out quite what is going on, and throw an unnecessary random element into proceedings. In A1GP, in particular, too many races have been decided by a botched wheel-change or a car that wouldn't fire up again. DTM seems not to have quite such problems on this score, but on the other hand, insisting on two mandatory pit stops over the course of a race of not much over an hour is absurd.

The problem of the racing being subservient to the interests of the manufacturers entering the cars can't easily be dealt with - he who pays the piper calls the tune after all. The pit stops, on the other hand.... Why not dump them. And howabout two half an hour races instead of a single hour long race?

Go East, Young Man

Back in the not so distant past, before Sheikh Maktoum and his cronies gave the world the mixed blessing that is A1GP, the Macau Formula 3 Grand Prix used to signal the end of the single seater racing calendar each year. In years past, Macau was a decidedly odd place to stage a race - a small down at heel Portuguese colony on China's East coast which must have felt like it was on the edge of the world. Certainly it was far from Formula 3's natural home of western Europe. Nonetheless, along with the sadly defunct Monaco GP F3 race and the Marlboro Masters at Zandvoort, it has long been one of the big races to win. A sure-fire way for an ambitious young driver to draw attention to himself.

Perhaps its the fact that it comes right at the end of the season. Thus, for many drivers, it is one last chance to make an impression on the movers and shakers in motorsport, particularly after a bad season. Equally, it is a chance to underline a year of remarkable achievement - to go out on a high. The list of previous winners doesn't do the event any harm either. Ayrton Senna won the event in 1983 and he was followed seven years later, and in typically controversial circumstances, by one Michael Schumacher. David Coulthard, Ralf Schumacher, Martin Donnelly and Takuma Sato weren't bad either, come to that, and if you include drivers who finished second, you can add Jenson Button, Robert Kubica and Jacques Villeneuve to the list of famous names who found success at Macau.

The track itself plays a part. Imagine Monaco with a long flat out section thrown in, just to confuse everyone and make car set up a nightmare. The place is very unforgiving, but the area between Fisherman's Bend and Lisbon corner is so quick that, unlike Monaco, a low-downforce set-up is a must. Thus drivers must quickly master an unfamiliar, and in places very narrow street circuit and get used to driving the slow stuff with far less grip than they would have available at, say Pau. Just to make their lives more difficult, the unique format of the weekend means that to win, they must survive a qualification race before they even get to the start of the Final. Which means that to win, one has to get round the ultra-tight first corner twice in a weekend. This time, all three of the front-runners from the first race failed to do this, after Euroseries champion Paul Di Resta screwed up his braking and eliminated himself, the inexplicably rapid Kobayashi and the similarly surprisingly fast Marko Asmer in one fell swoop. All of which handed British F3 champion, Mike Conway what he needed to come back from a rather unpromising 11th slot on the grid for the qualifier to win the event. For a full report on this year's race, check out Stella Thomas' report on Motorsport.com, Stewart Bell at Pitpass or Qwerty at Motor Racing Journal.

Strangely though, as motor racing has spread east, with Grands Prix in China and Malaysia, an A1GP race in Indonesia and talk of a race in India in the near future, the significance of the annual Macau race seems to have declined. All the more odd for the fact that where once Macau looked and felt like a forgotten, down at heel little place, surviving only as a place where the Chinese could go to gamble, these days the place seems to be booming (though the seedy feel hasn't entirely vanished - someone who was out there for the race this year remarked that the local Spas really ought to be labelled as either "brothel" or "not brothel" to save embarrassment for non-locals). Strange it may be, but it seems no less true for that. Kubica may have helped make a name for himself there last year, but the same can hardly be said of Lucas DiGrassi. A look through the list of recent winners scans like a list of almost-wases and nearly-rans - Alexandre Premat, Tristan Gommendy, Nicolas LaPierre, Darren Manning, Peter Dumbreck and Soheil Ayari, to name but a few. The really big F3 names seem to have taken to giving the race a miss of late. Last year, Lewis Hamilton dominated utterly the Euroseries, but feeling he had nothing further to prove, skipped the Macau race. Alvaro Parente, the British Champion had more straightforward budget problems and was also a no-show.

This year, though, had the strongest line up for some years. Perhaps because none of the major F3 champions yet have GP2 seats sorted out, even they felt that the race provided them with an opportunity to impress team bosses and potential backers. So Euroseries champion Paul Di Resta and much-feted runner up Sebastien Vettel were there. British series winner Mike Conway and runner up Oliver Jarvis were there, as was Japanese F3 champion and Euroseries refugee Adrian Sutil. Even Asian F3 champion Jamie Winslow put in an appearance. About the only significant absences were British F3 frontrunner Bruno Senna and Esteban Guerreri from over in the Euroseries. While Di Resta's appearance in the final was rather brief, Mike Conway's win just might help ease his path into GP2 next year. Kobayashi is probably thought of a lot more highly than he was at the beginning of the weekend too.

As Richard Asher points out in this week's Autosport though, what is really needed is a really serious international F3 race in Europe. The Monaco GP race has disappeared, and the fact that the Zandvoort Marlboro Masters runs on Kumho rubber puts non-Euroseries runners at a distinct disadvantage. What is needed is a race on neutral tyres to allow the best from Britain, the Euroseries, and the fast improving Spanish and German series to come together on equal terms. Somewhere a little closer to home and less expensive than Macau, fine race though it may be.