Motor racing: It’s Australian for beer

Say what you will about NASCAR, but Australian auto racing fans seem to have as much fun, if not more.

Take, for instance, next month’s Bathurst 1000, an annual weeklong event at Mt. Panorama in New South Wales that draws upward of 30,000 fans who camp out around the race circuit each year.

Police are clamping down, however, on the amount of alcohol those fans can take into the area and have set up checkpoints to make sure everyone complies.

The limits?

Each fan can take in 24 cans of full-strength beer or 36 cans of light beer per day, or 24 cans of mixed drinks or one cask of wine per day, with no combinations allowed.

“Anyone who needs to drink more than 24 cans of beer in a day to have a good time is not welcome,” said a police official.

Trivia time

What do NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West, NFL star Randy Moss, former Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton and strongman competitor Phil Pfister have in common?

Bad omen

New England quarterback Tom Brady’s injury Sunday puts in jeopardy his streak of 128 consecutive starts, third-longest in NFL history, and brings to mind another troubling statistic for Patriots fans.

Of the last 10 Super Bowl runners-up, only three made the playoffs the next season, and the other seven had a combined record of 43-69.

At a loss

Janice Hough of LeftCoastSportsBabe.com says fans in Oakland were more than ready for the NFL season to start:

“After enduring the woeful second half of the A’s, it will be a refreshing change to root for a team that only loses once a week.”

Wake-up call

Amir Kahn, the unbeaten great lightweight hope of British boxing, had this to say just three weeks ago about fighting Colombia’s Breidis Prescott:

“Prescott looks dangerous, but he’s just the kind of opponent I need at this stage of my career. He may have been knocking them out left, right and center, but I’m going to make him wake up and smell the coffee. I’ve been working on my defensive skills.”

Not enough, apparently. On Saturday, Prescott KO’d him in 54 seconds.

Trivia answer

They are the only athletes from West Virginia to have been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with special commemorative envelopes.

And finally

According to the Miami Herald’s Greg Cote, “Marion Jones, released from federal prison, made it from her cell to a waiting car in 9.94 seconds.”

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grahame.jones@latimes.com