V8 launches 2005 in style.

The V8 Supercar Championship Series has unveiled a bold new look, complete with theme song and strategic marketing campaign, designed to take the Australia's fastest growing spectator sport to a new level in 2005.

The people of Sydney voted with their feet as a crowd of more than 10,000 turned out for a two-hour public open day at the city's Olympic Park, where drivers, teams, transporters and cars had assembled for the first of several planned 'meet and greet' events.

"The series has grown so substantially in the last eight years that it is time to seriously lay down a challenge to sports that might be considered more 'mainstream'," AVESCO chairman Tony Cochrane said at the launch, "We know our numbers are the envy of many sports in this country. We put 1.6 million people through the gates in 13 rounds in 2004, and our television audience crossed 70 countries and 600 million homes.

"We are Australia's only truly national spectator sport and we command live prime time television. It is time for us to step up to the plate and get out there. We believe we deserve a lot more recognition, particularly by the media, than we currently receive given the numbers that we are posting year, after year, after year. To that end, the AVESCO marketing department, headed by Tracey Benton, has been given a substantial increase in funding by our board to take our sport further to the people."

Renowned Aussie rocker Diesel headlines the campaign with his remix of the 1964 Kinks hit 'You Really Got Me', on which the 2005 advertising push will be based. The theme supports research that the largest new demographic entering the V8 Supercar audience are families and young females, which has also prompted companies such as internet provider BigPond to support the series.

The championship will also welcome new sponsors Xbox, Snickers, Sidchrome and Yamaha to its portfolio in 2005, while Chrysler has also returned to the fold by providing the 250kW HEMI-powered V8 Chrysler 300C as the official vehicle of the Wright Patton Shakespeare safety car programme. But that is not the end of it, as Cochrane foreshadowed another major announcement that will be made prior to the Clipsal 500 that opens the series in Adelaide next month.

"Suffice to say, we have courted some of Australia and the world's major financial groups to come together and present the series with a product that will service Motorsport fans and all Australians," Cochrane said, "This will be one of the most significant announcements in the history of V8 Supercars."

The president also outlined the few rule changes to make it into the regulation book for the coming season, the most notable of which includes the restructuring of the points system that will allow teams and drivers to drop their worst round up to and including round ten at Bathurst. The results of the final three rounds will all count towards the championship.

"This is designed to allow teams who have had a poor round prior to, and including, Bathurst to still have the chance to be involved in a contest to close the season," AVESCO CEO Wayne Cattach explained, "As we saw last year, there were numerous instances of teams that may have had their championship hopes compromised by factors beyond their control, and this allows them to at least recover from one of these instances.

"The best teams will not be compromised. If you applied the theory to last year, the championship victors would still have been Stone Brothers Racing and Marcos Ambrose."

There will be no 'roll around' warm-up in 2005, with the session being replaced by a single warm-up lap. The cars will enter the track in garage order and proceed directly to the grid for the start of each race. Similarly, there will only be a 15-minute window between qualifying and the Top 10 Shootout, meaning that teams will not be able to make major modifications to their cars between sessions.