Hamilton 400 staying put

HELL no! That's the official line on the Hamilton 400 chugging toward the scrapheap.

Event organiser Stephen Vuleta has rubbished reports claiming the V8 Supercars street race is splut- tering to the point of stalling completely.

The truth, he says, is nothing but green lights.

"The [recent] articles written about the race's future have really been about my business partner's [event owner Dean Calvert] personal finance issues. But that doesn't put any pressure on the event," Vuleta told Sunday News.

"Will the 400 leave Hamilton or New Zealand? Hell no! And Hamilton City Council are just as dedicated to keep the event going. It's very clear, the event's secure, right? It's very secure.

"It's business as usual, absolutely, and our focus is to build it and make money out of it."

Vuleta revealed to Sunday News that, unlike Australian rounds of the V8 Supercar series, the Hamilton race is forced to foot every dollar of every expense, from hotel bills for team members and drivers to the eye-watering costs of flying the cars into New Zealand.

However, despite substantial losses over the last two years Vuleta says the 400 is actually close to returning profit.

"We have three revenue streams – corporate hospitality, sponsorship and ticket revenue. We don't have TV rights. V8 Supercars own those, that's just the deal," Vuleta said.

"It's about sales for us, you know. We need to work hard on getting those back. If we had gate sales and hospitality at 2008 event levels we'd be showing significant profit this year. The recession came at a really bad time. It's a matter of building back and we are doing that."

Vuleta declined questions over exactly how much money has been lost over the last two events but did say his only real concern ahead of this year's round were slow ticket sales, making it difficult to gauge how many temporary grandstands to draft in, particularly in light of overshooting by around 10,000 seats last year.

"All I have to stress is for Ham- iltonians to get behind the event – support it by buying tickets. From my point of view, having to build a temporary facility I want to make sure there is the right number of seats. It's different from having an event in a stadium.

"Sales have been slow and I don't want to have 5000 or 10,000 people just turning up on the day and not having a seat. We built 10,000 too many seats last year and we're not going to fall into that trap again."

McIntyre on pole

John McIntyre had the edge when it counted during today's top 10 qualifying shootout, taking pole position for the final round of the New Zealand V8 Championship in Taupo this weekend. McIntyre's pole-setting time of 1:35.472 was just 0.026 seconds quicker than Craig Baird, who leads the championship, with McIntyre holding second. Also within a whisker of McIntyre and Baird was defending champion Kayne Scott, who is in fourth. "As far as we know, to set four poles in one season is a record in this championship so that's a decent achievement to notch up," McIntyre said.

- © Fairfax NZ News