THE long-time voice of Supercars has given the deepest insight yet into his controversial departure from the championship’s broadcast.
Crompton addressed his “assassination” in depth at V8 Sleuth’s Bathurst Open Night earlier this month, and gave V8 Sleuth permission to share his words here.
“Over the journey, I guess I’ve learnt a lot and that means in that process I’ve also come to realise that you either do it properly or you don’t do it at all,” he explained.
“That’s really where my mind got to with this whole thing.
“So we got to halfway through 2025 and I had been actively involved in helping James (Warburton) come back into the role as the chief executive, and he and I had worked pretty closely together when he was CEO the first time around.
“Even while he was the chief executive at Seven I would go down there from time to time and we would just exchange notes, and from time to time he wanted us to do different things from our business standpoint to be able to support what he was doing at Seven.
“But very early in the piece last year something changed; I’m not sure what it was. I’ve never had a scuffle with James, there’s been no swear words, there’s been nothing untoward unfold other than very early in the piece he very clearly decided that he wanted change.
“He wanted it to be newer and fresher, which I fully understand and I actually support. I employ young people, I support young people. The category that I promote (i.e. Toyota 86s) has put 10 of the current drivers in the regular field of 24.
“You’d be crazy to think that you can just keep on walking the plank forever and not have renewal, so I have no quarrel with that notion at all. And television is a presentation business. I don’t need someone to tell me what my date of birth is or the colour of my hair, I’m well and truly aware of it.
“So I had actually been dialling myself away from on-camera roles, but there was a couple of things I enjoyed doing. One was the Hino Hub and I quite enjoyed going wandering on the grid and doing a few of those sort of things from time to time, but the rest of it was just the commentary stuff. But as we sort of got deeper into the year, I realised that he wanted to make a change.
“To cut a long story short… we had a whole bunch of meetings. It was like an episode of Utopia: we talked about a lot of things and got nowhere.
“Probably chief headline in it was the offer was to stay connected on the basis of an 80 percent paycut.
“That was kind of hard to swallow… I wanted to keep going if I could. I love work, I wanted to work, I have to work. It’s just something I wanted to do. I don’t want to sit around and watch daytime television. Sarah would kill me, quite rightly so.
Unpacking an Epic Bathurst 1000 | The Undercut
THE Bathurst 1000 once again turned out an all-time classic race, with all of the winners and losers put under the microscope in this episode of The Undercut!
“The idea was to pluck me out of the commentary box, low level duties on the periphery, but then he wanted me to come back and do Tailem Bend and (Bathurst). I said that’s a really difficult thing to do, because first of all, anything else that I could do to bolster my income is going to take me away from trying to do anything at the race meetings.
“It’s not like I’m going to open a bakery tomorrow or suddenly become a painter, I’m in motor racing and have been in motor racing all my life, I’ll die in motor racing. So it’s going to be difficult because anything else I can do to top myself up is going to be in conflict with what you’re talking about.
“And you can’t just arrive at what we like to term as the semi-final or the grand final in many respects and suddenly be plugged into what’s going on. You can’t just bomb into this car race here, you have to live it. You have to live everything that’s happened. It’s Race 30 of the championship season, 11 events in, and unless you’re glued into it along the way you just don’t know the storylines.
“So I had grave reservations but I didn’t say no. But I was really concerned about it.
“And then he was rolling out a bunch of things that were kind of challenging to manage: one, the research says you have got to go; two, the networks want change; three, the language is old; four, you’re out of touch with the modern drivers.
“It was sort of like ‘wow’. This was being delivered over a series of meetings. I’m like, why are we having the conversation? If the performance is so poor, then it’s probably best that we don’t do this and I come up with something else. ‘No, no, no, we want you to stay!’”
Crompton revealed there had been an offer to run the Dunlop Super2 Series to complement his portfolio, but he remained firm in the view that the arrangement wasn’t going to fly.
“I really knew in Adelaide that it was over when I took my headset off,” he said.
“Actually I did a couple of things: I thanked the audience, I had a bit of a broken voice when I did it, I pushed the button and thanked my beautiful crew, some really fantastic people that I had worked with there for a very long period of time, and then just took the headset off, got an uber to the airport and went home.”
Importantly, Crompton added of the Warburton captain’s call: “I respect it and accept it but I disagree with it.”