Quote Originally Posted by JackFlash View Post
The guy who wrote the column is Cito Beltran from Phil. Star, himself a motoring enthusiast. Maybe his press connections has made him very familiar w/ the funds of the team. You may have a lot of sponsors but if the amount funded isn't that big to begin with, then you will end up with a small operating budget. To put it simply, it's like having 10 sponsors but they only shell out P1000 each. That's peanuts compared to 5 sponsors who shell out P10,000 each. The Phil. team might have the same dilemma.

Anyway, a lot of the observations are right. Even if the sponsors were there, our guys would still have a hard time if they didn't have the right venue to practice in. Like having a well-funded basketball team practice on poorly constructed barangay courts. Come to think of it, even our well-funded basketball team can't hold its own vs. the rest of Asia anymore. But that's another topic.
Lately, the finished construction of the Clark International Speedway has given aspiring racers and weekend trackday nuts something to cheer about - CIS is a good addition to the local circuit roster of Subic International Raceway and Batangas Racing Circuit.

Sadly though, car racing is an expensive hobby/profession, and much also depends on how well the race driver can attract sponsorship money. If you've followed Formula 1's "silly season" over the years, you'll be familiar with this trade-off of sponsorship money over pure driving skill.

Looking beyond drifting and more into motorsport in general, you'll be surprised at what lengths the motorsport aficionados have gone to for the love of racing. Top Gear Philippines has already covered the local hillclimb series races on closed-off public mountain roads since 2007. Autocross/gymkhana is also a good venue for developing talent, partly because all you need are a lot of safety cones to make a course and an open stretch of asphalt.

I think the major challenge for increasing sponsorship is to make local motorsport marketable to Juan dela Cruz. The crowd is admittedly pretty small, probably because most people think you need to blow wads of cash on a good car to be competitive. That's probably true for drag racing and/or drifting (one does need money for tires), but in autocross and RWYB/trackdays, driving skill matters much much more. These events are exactly how one could bring motorsport to the magic grassroots level.

Exactly how one can get racing well off the streets and onto the racetracks, as well as increasing the viewership, will determine the future success of local motorsport.