Remember the V8 Supercar Championship?

It's Australia's major motor racing series. Famous drivers like Craig Lowndes race in it and it resumes this weekend.

Mark Skaife used to as well, but now he's semi-retired - from racing, although he has a heap of new jobs.

Wearing one of those new hats, or caps, Skaife is advocating that, in certain circumstances, speeds on certain public roads ought to be raised to 140 kilometres per hour.

He's also urging other things, like better driver education and better road construction, but the idea of people driving faster seems curiously at odds with the oft-trumpeted "speed kills" and "wipe off 5" messages.

But back to the V8 Supercar Championship.

Its last round was on May 15-16 - at Winton in northern Victoria.

So it will be five weeks when the series resumes at Darwin's Hidden Valley track this weekend.

There was meant to have been a round at Perth's Barbagallo Raceway - or Wanneroo - on June 5-6, but that was cancelled before the season got underway.

It was canned a day before the series organisers and the circuit operator, the WA Sporting Car Club, were due to talk about things.

V8 Supercars Australia branded the Perth track "third world".

In more polite moments the reason was "occupational health and safety issues".

One of the strengths for a long time of the Australian Touring Championship which morphed into the V8 Supercar Championship has been that it's been truly national.

Not a lot of sports can legitimately claim to have that.

But the V8 Supercar Championship has been less than that this year without its traditional West Australian round.

In all likelihood it will be back next year, with some WA government money towards an upgrade at Wanneroo.

Despite the cancellation this season, some V8 Supercar teams traveled across the Nullabor anyway - for interaction with deprived fans and, in some cases, for the benefit of sponsors who had paid them on the basis they were going to WA to race.

The pity about the five-week gap between rounds is that, apart from robbing Sandgroper fans of their serve of top-level racing, the championship lost the momentum it had.

And, despite the apparent financial buoyancy of V8 Supercar racing, that was overdue and much-needed momentum.

Early in the season the championship had looked like being a walkover for Jamie Whincup, the champion of the past two years.

Whincup and his Team Vodafone, in which Lowndes is the other driver, had made a smooth transition from racing Ford Falcons to Holden Commodores and were winning almost everything.

But then at Willowbank, near Ipswich in Queensland, James Courtney won both races in his Jim Beam Falcon, then repeated that feat at Winton, taking the series lead from Whincup.

The championship was suddenly alive. There was a serious contest.

Not only between drivers, but - in the tribalism of this still basically blue-singlet sport - between the participating car manufacturers, even if the Whincup Commodore and Courtney Falcon came out of the same Triple Eight Race Engineering workshop.

The five-week break stalled the momentum.

So now the championship gets back on track in Darwin, with the next round three weeks later at Townsville.

Then there's another gap in the calendar - of two months, until September 11-12, the weekend of the Phillip Island enduro in Victoria that leads into what remains far and away the biggest national motor race of the year, the Bathurst 1000, in early October.

The two-month mid-season "holiday" was always scheduled and wouldn't be so bad but for the unscheduled five weeks the series has already had "off" - or certainly out of the public eye.

And it is that public eye - in person at the tracks and on television - that is so important, especially in a sport that absorbs so many sponsorship dollars.

The V8 Supercar organisers are exceptionally proud - some would say boastful - of their achievements over the past decade or so.

These have included the switch of telecaster from Ten to the Seven network, the addition of new street races in Sydney and Townsville, and a second Middle East round, in Abu Dhabi, as well as the one already in Bahrain.

There's the prospect of more overseas races, perhaps next in Singapore, once WA is restored.

But there are some raw nerves in the V8 Supercar community, especially over declining TV audiences and now the series calendar.

A couple of years ago there was a determination to get the calendar right - especially to get some rhythm into it as a TV "product".

That's blown up this year. First there was the scheduling of the first two rounds in the Middle East, a giant moneyspinner for V8SA but unpopular with participants and fans, and the axing of WA.

The void that created has coincided with Mark Webber's success in Formula One - even if he has now lost the world championship lead, however narrowly, after successive quinellas by Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.

And, for the truest of believers among Australians who follow motorsport, there has been the telecasts of the Indianapolis 500, the regular NASCAR banquet, and the Le Mans 24-Hour in France.

The vision of that sports car classic on Eurosport last weekend was riveting - exotic machinery in four classes, many great drivers (although Nigel Mansell crashed within 20 minutes of his debut there at 56!), and a shock result (Audi finishing 1-2-3 after Peugeot had qualified 1-2-3-4 and set the race pace).

The attendance at the circuit was announced as 238,850.

We are accustomed to inflated crowd figures from motor racing promoters, but by any stretch the number at Le Mans was mega.

Australians are rightly proud of our Great Race at Bathurst, but Le Mans is a world phenomenon.