The cars were faster than ever at Bathurst last weekend but the Australian public has applied the brakes hard on the Great Race telecast.

Seven dominated its rival networks in Sunday's numbers from official ratings agency OzTAM, but the TV audience for the 1000km touring car classic has reversed rapidly in recent years.

Six months ago today we revealed here V8 Supercar Australia's SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, in which decreasing TV ratings were listed as one of the sport's shortcomings.

Sunday's Bathurst numbers confirmed the trend.

And now viewers are up in arms that what they thought was a live telecast was, by the chequered flag on TV, 27 minutes - or 10 laps - behind.

Craig Lowndes broke Greg Murphy's longstanding Mt Panorama track record with a lap of 2 minutes 6.8012 seconds last Friday and then won the race with Mark Skaife in their Holden Commodore.

But angry fans were as fast as Lowndes in firing off protests on social networking sites at Seven backing up the race footage as it squeezed in the advertisements from which it reaps many millions of dollars.

Seven spokesman Simon Francis' explanation - "The closeness of the race, the reduced number of safety cars, advertising commitments and our desire that viewers not miss a single moment of the race led us to time-shift our coverage. Our objective was viewers not miss a moment of action." - did not wash with TV viewers awake to what had happened.

One angry fan reckoned on tvtonight.com.au that incidents from the race were appearing on Youtube before they were seen on our TV screens.

Some conspiracy theorists thought Seven was sabotaging the 5pm start of the Japanese Formula One Grand Prix telecast on Ten's OneHD, although that's a long bow to draw.

While rapidly ballooning, on the back of Mark Webber's success, the OneHD F1 audience is still less than a third of Bathurst at 315,000 on Sunday.

However, OneHD's Sydney and Melbourne F1 numbers - 104,000 and 99,000 - were better than regular V8 Supercar Championship rounds often get now in those two major cities.

But it's the raw numbers for Bathurst - the crown jewel of Australian motor racing - that must be the biggest cause for concern for the V8 Supercar fraternity.

While Seven still dominated its rival networks on Sunday, the average audience for the Great Race of 1.046 million viewers in the five major capital cities was well short of that in years gone by.

If the trend of several years continues the figure will be below 1 million next October.

The race was still the seventh most watched program on TV on Sunday, and the podium presentation was No. 2 at 1.316 million. Seven News, after Bathurst, was No. 1 at 1.621 million.

Yet when Australia's major motor racing category returned to Seven in 2007 the Great Race drew an average of 1.357 million in the five major capitals - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

Sunday's 1.046 million was 22.9 per cent below that '07 figure, and 136,000 - or 11.5 per cent - fewer viewers than last year's 1.182 million.

The latest number was less than 90 per cent of the 1.183 million for the Australian F1 GP run at Melbourne's Albert Park in late March.

It also was only half the average audience of 2.091 million in the five capitals on October 3, the Sunday before Bathurst, for the National Rugby League grand final in Sydney.

And it was less than 40 per cent of either of the two recent AFL grand finals - 2.777 million for the first and 2.679 million for the replay.

Considerably more people in Sydney watched the AFL final on September 25 (368,000) and the replay on October 2 (405,000) between two Melbourne teams playing at the MCG than watched Bathurst (335,000) in NSW.

The average audience across the five major capitals is the benchmark for the TV industry and advertisers, although in their propaganda all the networks pounce on whatever numbers suit them best.

Seven trumpeted on Monday that 3.45 million Australians in the five cities had watched all or part of its Bathurst coverage on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

It boasted that the final 15 minutes of Sunday's race drew an average metropolitan market audience of 1.353 million viewers.

And it proclaimed an "astonishing" peak of 1.519 million viewers in the five capitals.

But Seven's announcements over the years - accessible under ‘media releases' on its sevencorporate.com.au website, and based on OzTAM's figures - show that the Bathurst peak last year was 1.74 million, in '08 it was 1.89 million and in '07 it was 1.97 million.

In 2006, the last year of the V8 Supercars on Ten, the peak was 2.244 million - 725,000 more than on Sunday.

While the five capitals average is the industry standard, there is also a national average, in which a regional component is included.

Seven reported a national average of 1.643 million for last Sunday's race, but in 2007 it was 2.157 million.

So over the past three years 514,000 viewers - or 23.82 per cent - of that average national audience have found something else or better to do on the day of the Great Race.

Bathurst 1000 five-capitals average viewers

2007 1.357 million

2008 1.249 million

2009 1.182 million

2010 1.046 million

Bathurst 1000 national average viewers

2007 2.157 million

2008 1.936 million

2009 1.864 million

2010 1.643 million