MOTORSPORT Australia’s grand plan for Avalon is full steam ahead despite the 2024 Victorian state budget providing a setback.
A 150-hectare site at Avalon Airport Precinct was last year confirmed as the location for a proposed Victorian Home of Motorsport.
At the time, the state government pledged $1.6 million towards designing and planning of the facility.
That has since been quietly completed, meaning the next step – construction – awaits, contingent on funding.
That did not arrive in the Victorian budget released yesterday, but Motorsport Australia CEO Sunil Vohra remains undeterred.
“It just changes timing for us,” he told V8 Sleuth.
“It just means it’s not this year that we get to start the construction phase.
“We are ready to get underway, it is just the current fiscal conditions in Victoria – other than existing commitments, nothing new really was funded in this year’s budget as the government just looks to try to stabilise their broader fiscal situation.
“We certainly understand that and had expected that that would be the decision for this year for a little while, and therefore we have been working with government and the Department of Sport/Rec Victoria very closely about what we now do over the next 12 months to continue momentum and refine our case for the following year.”
Vohra anticipates a three-year build phase, meaning that 2028 becomes the new target if funding is secured in next year’s budget.
He also reiterated Avalon is more than simply a succession plan for Sandown and will bring benefits to all levels of motorsport.
“We were just down there a few weeks ago actually with the Linfox team and talking through where things will be placed, how it would look, where access roads would come; all the different things you do as you get towards starting a construction phase,” he said.
“Clearly we would have loved to have started it this year but that’s not going to be the case.
“We’re going to go again with new vigour to be able to try to start it next year.”
That such progress on the project had been made behind the scenes is welcome news, given how talk around Avalon had seemed to go concerningly quiet in recent times.
“We’ve got very detailed circuit designs,” Vohra revealed.
“There’s four options, they’ve all been through the quantity surveyors, they’ve been costed in terms of construction and then run costs.
“I think we were respectful of the process with treasury, we weren’t necessarily wanting to put out blow-by-blow comms as to what was happening each week.
“We were engaging in good faith with the process to be able to follow the templates that we had around providing the investment case and the different options as to what that case could look like.
“Clearly now we have reached a decision point where it’s not in this year’s budget so we can expand our horizons a little bit more with talking about some more elements of the benefits to Victoria with the Minister, who has asked for that, and with his department, and potentially also we can start to communicate a little bit more about what the circuit looks like.
“There’s some amazing circuit design drawings we would love to be able to share when we’re able to so people can see what this facility could look like and all the infrastructure around it and how it would benefit that entire region.”
