Crompton opens up on 'frightening' health battle

Supercars commentator Neil Crompton says his battle with prostate cancer was a "frightening time" in his life.

Crompton was diagnosed with prostate cancer in April and was absent from the commentary team for the Darwin and Townsville events.

After undergoing surgery, Crompton has made a steady recovery and returned to the broadcast in July, presenting remotely from Sydney for the second Townsville event.

The Supercars Hall of Famer is currently hosting the Cash Converters Supercars Eseries broadcast on Wednesday evenings.

"[The] operation went well, the aftermath’s going well," Crompton said on the V8 Sleuth Podcast.

"There’s an ongoing monitoring to make sure that it stays that way; you’re never 100 per cent out of the woods.

"[I’m] not 100 percent healthy right now, frankly, but very close to it.

"There’s still a few little things that I’m navigating around, but [I’ve got] an unbelievable team of doctors.

"It was a pretty frightening time, quite frankly.

"A little footnote in the pathology from it all - had we not accidentally tripped over what happened - I would’ve been dead somewhere between a year and five years from now."

Crompton once again thanked fans for their support after he was warmly received at the hosting desk for the Eseries.

"The response and the support and the messages of care and love and concern were really uplifting," he said.

"It’s hard to actually find the right words that don’t sound like you’re just reading off the script, but it was… a seismic shift in my life and a hell of a wake-up call of how dramatically sideways things can go.

"But [it was also] a beautiful reckoning that whatever I’ve done - good, bad or indifferent in motorsport - I won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but there’s certainly some people out there that have enjoyed my work and they’ve expressed that, and it’s a really lovely thing."

Crompton and the V8 Sleuth team have been working on his autobiography, ‘Neil Crompton: Best Seat in the House’, which is set for release later this month.

"It’s been a bigger process than I thought it might have been,” he said of the writing process.

"I was dismissive of the idea because I didn’t think there was interest in it, but I’ve found there are folk out there that are interested.

"You don’t realise until you stop, draw a breath and look backward, how long your journey has been. It's cliché but it’s been a long period of time.

"The fun part was trying to unpack that and put it in some order."