History of ATCC/V8SC/VASC & other Touring Car Television coverage & TV deals pre-2015

[one five five]

I'm interested in starting a discussion and working up a personal database of the various TV deals and telecasts that the Championship and Touring Car racing in general has had over the years prior to the new-for-2015 Foxtel/Channel 10 deal.

From what I remember and can make out.

Pre-1983 - Generally ABC or Ch7 showed ATCC rounds, sometimes live, sometimes tape delayed, sometimes no TV coverage, the tracks worked their own TV deals out for their events

1983 & 1984 - ABC got the TV rights for all events, negotiated by CAMS. Except for Round 1 1983 at Calder, as Calder had an exclusive TV contract with Channel 7. All the rounds were live except for the city in which the event was taking place, in which case it was a delayed coverage that night.

From 1985 to 1996, Channel 7 got the ATCC rights. Winton 1985 was tape delayed a week later, but all other rounds were live into Sydney and Brisbane, and other centres got them sometimes live, sometimes delayed if it clashed with the AFL. In the later years of the Channel 7 deal it became tape delayed in all major centres, even in Sydney which could care less about the AFL.

In 1997 the rights went to Channel 10, who had a standard 3-5pm telecast time in all centres, except for Mallala and Wanneroo which were a week delayed in 1997 and 1998.

Then when 7 got the rights back in 2007, we started getting a lot more Saturday TV coverage from all the events compared to the previous deal.

What was the TV coverage like for the other non-ATCC events like AMSCAR, the Endurance events etc... We used to get edited highlights of the AMSCAR races in Melbourne as a kid, but obviously the full events got shown live in Sydney.

Then obviously Bathurst, with Channel 7, then 10 , then Channel 7 again... plus of course the Kerry Packer bid of 1979 for the TV rights to go to Channel 9 which was unsuccessful

What were the TV contracts worth in the original ABC deal in 1983, or the Channel 7 deal for 1985, or the Channel 10 deal in 1997?


PS...I'm not interested in the pros/cons of FTA vs PayTV with the 2015 deal, so hopefully that can be left out of it. I think this can be an interesting discussion, so hopefully it can stay somewhat on topic and pre-2015