Running 2023 Motorsports thread

I've always wondered, when they show the view down the main straightaway in Turn 1, how anyone can see the whole race with the grandstand behind pit row? Nowadays, lots of jumbo-sized TVs, I imagine, but before?

 

No way you can see the whole race from anywhere in the track, apart from maybe the top of the pagoda. Place is absolutely massive.

Back in the pre-video screen days, the track announcers did a LOT of heavy lifting to let you know what happened in corners you weren't sitting in.

 

Tell me all about the things that need fixing. Not trying to be a dick, but I'd like to hear it because people say things like that without being specific.

Listen, I'm not saying the series is perfect, it isn't, but it's in a much better place than it was 20 years ago when it seriously looked like it might go down the tubes.

IndyCar isn't competing to be the NFL or NBA. Auto racing is a niche sport. Apart from a barely decade-long period for NASCAR in the 90s and early 2000s, it always has been.

Racing has always been event-based and dependent on attendance, so it's important to square the circle between putting on a good show, creating enough respect from wonks to admire the equipment, and have something unique enough to sell to the public.

IndyCar's strength is its versatility. Road course, street course, ovals. It has a brand no other major racing series does. That's half the battle. The other part is recognizing that racing is part of a wider event and that racing alone rarely sells itself, no matter what series it is. At road courses, you can camp out for the weekend. At street courses, you can party in the city. Ovals have had to learn to adapt. Even Indy "needs" the Snake Pit stage to draw in casual folks.

Indy 500 TV ratings will no doubt suck compared to years past, but TV ratings are mostly meaningless for almost every sport given how fragmented the audience is with a gazillion more choices.

What isn't meaningless and which can be compared by era is butts in seats. Indy was packed yesterday. Attendance was good all month, even for practices. Attendance has been up in most forms of motorsport, so it's part of a trend.

As for the tire? It was scary as hell and very fortunate it didn't go into the grandstand. Granted, it was a very weird combination of events that caused it, the angle of the accident, the glancing manner in which the wheel base took the impact, thus rendering the tire tether useless, but good luck telling that to the victim of such an accident had it occurred.

Is it an IndyCar-specific problem? Maybe due to speeds on ovals creating higher-energy impacts, but past that, it's an open-wheel problem generally given what equipment is exposed.

How do you solve it? I'm no crash specialist, but I imagine it's tough to find the sweet spot between where you sort out how to mitigate the impact. Make the tires or assembly too heavy and then the impact is just transferred to the driver in the cockpit?

IndyCar actually strengthened standards for wheel tethers during this offseason. Taking time off their usable life. What I don't know is whether IndyCar has double tethers like F1 has.

 

There was more action in the last few laps at Indy than there was over the entire weekend at Monaco. Does IndyCar have exotic locales like Monaco, Australia, Italy and Vegas? No, but for me what it does have from a viewer standpoint is a much more competitive product, not the bi-weekly procession of 18 other cars chasing the Red Bulls.

 

A few of the issues I see:

• The broadcasts are difficult to watch. In this year's Indy 500 broadcast there were 117 laps broadcast normally. The other 83 laps had commercials, including 51 laps -- more than a quarter of the race -- shown side-by-side with commercials. That's insane. If ESPN can show F1 without commercials despite paying far more for the contract, NBC can find a way to actually show some of the race. (I also think the commentary is pretty bad. They act like there's no such thing as strategy and every decision is done by Magic 8 Ball.)
• In terms of spectator interest the 500 is in great shape. The rest of the series is hurting. Long Beach does well. Nashville does fine, despite being the worst layout currently in use in any major series. Outside of that? Barber seems OK. The other ovals look abandoned during a race. Laguna Seca is a wonderful circuit and the attendance for IndyCar looks like some local car club's track day.
• There are some damn good drivers in the series. There are also too many fucking idiots, and the overall driving standard is just poor. I'm tired of watching guys wreck on every damn restart. I tuned in to the 500 with 15 laps to go. Of those 15 laps I believe a grand total of one had a green flag for the entire lap, and those 15 laps took an hour to complete. The same thing happens every year in Long Beach, St. Pete and Nashville. And on a related note: Pato O'Ward made an amateur hour pass attempt on someone, crashed out, and then said afterward that next time he'd make sure he took out the other guy too. I mean, leave that pro wrestling shit to NASCAR.
• I don't know what you do about this, but the wheel incident was a reminder that someday a pretty serious reckoning is coming regarding the safety of open wheel cars on a track like Indy. It's remarkable that the wheel cleared the grandstand. If it didn't there's an excellent chance we're looking at multiple fatalities. The cars are safer than they've ever been -- it's been a few years since we've seen a team fuck up the aero and send someone doing somersaults through the air on the back straight -- but it's not the 60s and 70s anymore, sensibilities have changed, and I don't think anyone has the stomach for a car or wheel hurtling into a packed grandstand, and it feels like a serious run of luck that it hasn't happened.

IndyCar's biggest strength is that as a spec series, every race is close. There are pluses and minuses to that, but at least it helps you avoid the single-team dominance that so often happens in F1. Outside of that, though, I never find myself drawn in to IndyCar... and if they can't grab me, that's not a great sign for the series.

 

Pretty good save by Tyler Reddick in the 600.

 

And in other news, we've seen Chase Elliott intentionally (or so it appears) take out Denny Hamlin; Michael McDowell lose his right front tire at speed and have it go bouncing down the track; there is still a full Xfinity Series race after this one; and Kyle Busch decided it'd be fun to turn some laps in reverse.
It's been quite a day at Charlotte.

 

I agree on the marketing side. I didn't watch "100 Days to Indy", so maybe the CW is where it belongs, but I can't remember the last time I tuned into the CW for anything. It is maddening that they have been so ineffectual for so long at marketing the series. I honestly thought that was one thing Penske would address quickly when he bought it, but he's had a lot of other fires to put out - especially closing on the deal right before a shutdown of all major sporting events.

 

I'll lead off by saying I probably should have said "a lot right now that needs fixing, as does NASCAR and nearly every other form of racing in North America." It was late, but you made an honest request for follow-up, so I'll tell a story and then get to my points.

There was a guy at church, retired Air Force WX, named Stu, who would bring me all his back issues of AutoWeek, which I happily collected, to my Mom's consternation. I only read the racing articles and I wore out the annual Fan Guide, with the track diagrams and the team photos. I'm not saying I was anywhere near IndyCar's biggest fan, but I definitely knew who Hiro Matsushita was (and given how hilarious I found swearing at that age, I wish someone had told me his nickname) and venues like Surfer's Paradise and even some of the sports car venues like Sebring, Mosport Park and Lime Rock. Sadly, my Dad made it clear that any racing would get my car removed and I've never had anywhere near the means to take up the sport.

Anyway, here's some stuff I see, and honestly a lot of it is just that Tony George broke something pretty good and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put that together again.

1. The series has always had something of a chimerical nature, but it seems like you have to watch a lot of the oval races through your hands and a lot of the road (and especially street) races with your eyes pinned open. Honestly, that was probably the case in the 90s and 2000s too (RIP Greg Moore and Dan Wheldon), but now I'm an adult it seems different. We tried all ovals and no one watched, and you can never really be all road/street when Indy is in your name.

2. Also as it was in the 90s and 2000s, there seems to be two (maybe 2 1/2) classes of racers: Europeans (and Brazilians) who didn't have the talent or funding to get an F1 ride and Americans who don't move the needle. The one Andretti of this generation lost his one good shot in a gut punch and, IIRC, everyone hates him. As I said last night, the Indy 500 champion was an American who had won the series twice and I had to look his bio up on Wikipedia. I fully admit that is on me, to a point, but I don't think that's good for the brand. I don't think it's great that last year's Indy champion is a guy a fair amount of people remember from Drive to Survive for losing his ride at the back of the F1 field and flipping a bunch of times in Turn 1 at Monza. At least Grosjean hasn't won yet, though I think I'd like to see him get one. (By the way, the half is Ed Carpenter, and the likes of Sarah Fisher and some of the other American privateers, of sorts.)

3. As for the events, I always miss the novelty of Burke Lakefront Airport, and there are a couple other venues (see Mile, Milwaukee). None of that would exactly fix anything. I'm not a big Leigh Diffey fan (everything sounds like screaming), but Paul Page isn't coming through that door. That said, NBC tries too hard to NASCAR-ize their stuff, and I realize they're trying to make their money on Dale Jr.'s contract but I think it spites their IndyCar work.

So, basically I want everything to go back to how it was when I was a kid and then time-travel back to 1995 and shoot Tony George. Totally reasonable request, right?

 

F1 on ESPN is presented commercial-free because somebody is paying up front for it, with the usual sponsorship announcements (past two years it was Mother’s Car Care, this year it’s Mercedes-Benz).