If South African motorheads were still mourning the loss of Clarkson, Hammond and May on Top Gear this will come as another shot straight to the guts.

Bernie Ecclestone, F1 supremo, has flattened South Africa’s chances of hosting a Formula One event in the near future. We lasted hosted a race back in 1993, but it looks like unless we get our ducks in a row pretty quickly that won’t be changing any time soon. Here’s EWN quoting Bernie:

If somebody sits in front of me today, with a pen, and wants to sign a contract there can be a race next year.

I think it’s really a case of someone getting behind this and saying, ‘we’re going to make it happen’ because unless somebody does that it will just bumble on like it is with a lot of interest, and when it really comes down to it nobody is really making the effort to do anything.

(It’s) Impossible to say because I think there’s a big percentage of having another meeting and another conversation which will produce nothing. There’s been various suggestions over where the race should be: the one that I thought was sensible for Cape Town and everything was a street race in Cape Town which looked as if it was all going to go ahead, and then didn’t go ahead.

Someone needs to be, and speak about this, who’s in a position to make a commitment and there hasn’t been anybody.

He then made reference to our controversial FIFA 2010 World Cup football bid, saying that fiasco won’t count against us moving forward:

We won’t be bribed and we won’t bribe anyone, so I don’t care. I’m not the slightest bit interested in what other people do and I’m quite sure that what happened with the football as happened in South Africa like many, many parts of the world in all sorts of other businesses and politics.

So what do we need then? The folks at the Cape Town Grand Prix South Africa consortium had previously made mention of organising the event, having released a statement in June saying they were just weeks away from presenting a proposal, but nothing seems to have come from that as of yet.

It’s not exactly a death knell, and we can remain somewhat hopeful of seeing the event at some point down the line, but until we see a concrete proposal it will remain very much on the back burners.

[source:ewn]