Tarmac West: making news from a familiar event
MOTORSPORT · MAJOR EVENTS · EARNED MEDIA · MEDIA MANAGEMENT
TL;DR
Established in 2005, this long-running motorsport event has no celebrities and nothing obviously new – same course with mostly the same competitors. In 2025, Pronto generated 38 pieces of local coverage across print, TV and radio.
The Brief
Tarmac West is Perth’s premier four-day tarmac rally and celebration of motorsport on Langley Park. Pronto PR has been Media Manager since 2014. The challenge in 2025: generate genuine media interest in a long-running event with no ‘new’ news angle and no celebrities or personalities to hang a story on.
The Approach
Find the story the audience of each outlet actually wants, and hand the media ready-to-run material including vision, interviews and human angles, rather than results in a niche sport.
- Shot and supplied news vision and interviews so outlets could run stories with minimal effort.
- Found character-led angles, such as married couple Cindy and Nigel Jones racing a 1964 Mini, that works beyond the motoring pages.
- Tailored pitches to each outlet’s audience rather than pushing a single generic release.
Media Coverage Generated
38 pieces of coverage, including a half-page story in The West Australian the week before the event, a segment on Sunrise, multiple nightly TV news stories built from Pronto-supplied vision and interviews, and a PerthNow feature on the 1964 Mini that was syndicated to The West and shared on social.
The story was syndicated across high-traffic media networks. Combined, the outlets that ran it draw a potential monthly audience of 46.8 million and 30.6 million unique monthly visitors (source: SimilarWeb). Of that potential audience, the articles themselves drew 308.3k coverage views.
The Headline Numbers
38 total pieces of coverage
308k online coverage views
10+ TV broadcast stories
870k TV viewers
636 print coverage circulation (captured)
What they said...
"ProntoPR has been managing the PR on our Targa West events, now called Tarmac West, since 2014. Producing creative Media Releases, TV segments on the News or Live Weather crosses and brilliant data stats after every event. Dianne not only promotes our events but also ensures that the competitors are the centre of the promotions."
"This is a highly professional PR firm - proactive, prompt, efficient and accurate. I have thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with Pronto PR."