All-purpose open-wheel (F1, IRL) racing thread

I guess Alonso's entry didn't draw in enough F1 fans to get a bump out of that.

Reading some of the racing forums, I get the feeling that those people were pretty thrilled at the amount of hard charging that goes on at Indy. I guess they tuned in expecting to watch an F1-style parade for four hours.

 

The ratings in England were up 975% over last year.

As for American F1 fans, they're watching the Indy 500 anyway. It's not like they're unfamiliar with the sport.

 

Monaco Grand Prix came in for a lot of stick on social media after a boring race with lots of people wondering, as they probably do every year, if F1 has outgrown a street circuit like Monaco with the wider cars etc. and whether the spectacle of the race there makes up for the terrible product. @PCLoadLetter, what do you say? (By the way, if there is one F1 race I could attend on someone else's dime - or yacht - it would be that one.)

 

Yeah, the cars have outgrown Monaco, but that's part of the charm. You kind of have to take Monaco for what it is. The roads are absurdly narrow and there's really only one decent passing spot on the circuit. That can lead to some great battles, but far more often it leads to parades like we had Sunday. I think this race made it 12 out of the last 14 winners coming from the front row of the grid. (The other two came from the second row.)

I love Monaco but you can really only have one race like that a year. It's a unique challenge, but it's more of a spectacle than a race. Hell of a spectacle, though.

 

Given the history and tradition F1 has in Monaco there is no way the race is disappearing unless the organizers decide not to cough up for it. It's a home race for many of the drivers even if it does end up becoming a parade on race day. Read somewhere it takes three weeks to set up and just as long to tear down so it must be a pain in the ass to live there at race time but if you have the money to live in Monaco you can just float on your yacht during that time. People in Toronto bitch endlessly if the part of Lakeshore Drive that is closed for the Toronto Indy isn't open 10 minutes after the checkered flag.

 

Supposedly Monaco pays next to nothing for the race. It's not going anywhere.

When Jenson Button crashed out I was curious to see if he'd go back to the pits or just walk to his apartment. I know a few years ago Kimi was knocked out and just went out to a yacht for the rest of the race.

 

Button could walk back to his apartment, Werhrlein almost ended up in the water!

 

The yacht jokes reminded me of a question that often comes to me:

Those of you who are bigger F1 fans than I, are motorsports more of an upper class sport in Europe, particularly F1?

Talking about from a spectator and fan standpoint.

 

Interesting to look at the final practice speeds, in hindsight. Castroneves and Sato were 1-2, just flipped. (That's why my two friends predicted Sato would win during our prerace tailgate.) But Jones and Chilton way back.

 

Chilton and Jones benefited from the way the yellows fell over the final half of the race. They were able to pit under yellow to gain track position when the leaders stayed out. That pretty much killed Alonso's chances even before the engine blew. His car wasn't nearly as strong in the later stages and he wound up bogged in traffic. Chilton even said his car was awesome in clean air and terrible once Sato and Castroneves got by.

TV ratings are almost useless. Nielsen families have become more and more of an inaccurate measurement of viewing habits as the media landscape fragments. I watched the race on a streaming Roku feed.

But the trend is unmistakable, traditional TV viewing of auto racing is declining rapidly -- if I'm Brian France or Mark Miles, I'm begging Madison Avenue executives to dismiss those numbers. For IndyCar's future health, Miles needs to get NBC/NBCSN to bid on the 500 and get the entire series on one network. ABC's coverage remains stuck in the 1970s.