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

Oof. No, but that was kinda awful anyway, wasn't it?

 

That was a helluva race. On the second-to-last restart, Kanaan made one of the most unreal restart passes I'd ever seen, and Sato's pass of Dixon late in the race took quite a set.

The finish reminded me a lot of 1989 -- 2 pretty good drivers going hard into the corner where there really wasn't room in the racing line for both (though Dario tried to give Sato room).

That was the most entertaining 500 I've seen in a long time. Last year was the best finish, but this was the best race start-to-finish. IndyCar has hit a homerun with the new Dallara cars (which actually made IndyCar road racing not just watchable, but pretty good) and multiple engine manufacturers back in the series, bringing some healthy competition. On an oval, the new cars seemed to evoke the old Hanford Device era -- lots of draft that allowed for lots of passing. Several teams have a chance to win, the cream still rises to the top, but guys were making some ridiculous moves and making them stick.

 

The other thing is, NASCAR has been placed as an essential part of the country culture that has dominated the country for a while (although it has certainly waned in recent years). It made itself a cultural phenomenon, and that subculture is the most ridiculously brand-loyal and star-struck one in the U.S. Not a bad thing, but NASCAR successfully tapped into that. However, the fallout for other forms of racing is that it became an either/or. In the "old days," gearheads were gearheads. They raced stock cars in the south, open-wheel cars in the Midwest, Texas and the West Coast, and modifieds in the northeast. You followed what was nearby because there wasn't racing on TV, everyone paid attention to Indy (and later Daytona) and just about everyone who could ran in both -- A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, the Yarborough/Yarbroughs.

What happened in the 1990s wasn't just the split, although that was certainly an issue, but also the rise of country culture at the time NASCAR had a bevvy of recognizable stars (at the same time, Unser, Foyt, Johncock, Mears, Sneva, Rutherford, Mario ... pretty much every major star of the 1970s-80s ... retired within about 3 years of each other). That subculture often has an "us vs. them" mentality, and tends to eschew anything seen as "Yankee" or in competition with a country institution. In other words: IndyCar became "Yankee racing," NASCAR was "real racing." Most of the criticism of IndyCar I've heard comes from one of two sources: bitter ex-CART fans, and cultural NASCAR fans (or people who have heard both lines so long, they parrot both).

Suddenly, motorsports fandom became either/or, rather than both/and. And the gearhead population suddenly had to make a choice during a time when you could watch Dale and Rusty and Bobby and Jeff and DW in stock cars, a handful of pretty solid drivers running mostly anonymous races, or you could watch a few decent drivers and the racing dentist at Indianapolis. Easy choice to make.

I don't think it hurts. Emerson Fittipaldi, Mario Andretti, Arie Luyendyk, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and Alex Zanardi were all popular in their day. Dan Wheldon's win last year was one of the most popular victories I've seen in a long time. The loudest cheers at Indy today during driver intros were for Castroneves and Kanaan (and Barrichello). The cheering when Kanaan made that ridiculous late restart to take the lead was almost Danica-level. Sure, do Marco Andretti & Graham Rahal have fan bases? Sure. J.R. Hildebrand certainly developed a small one last year after the way he handled his disappointment at Indy.

What else has happened is that the U.S. development system has changed. Tony George's flawed premise behind the IRL was trying to recreate the link between sprint car drivers & IndyCar drivers. A few got through -- Tony Stewart, Sarah Fisher among them. But that ship had long since sailed -- there is no connection between a front-engined dirt car with mechanical grip and a rear-engined formula car with wings and aero technology (but there's a lot of connection between dirt cars and stock cars). In the last decade, the high-level karting scene has really exploded in the U.S., and it has begun to graduate some pretty solid drivers to Indy: Danica Patrick & Sam Hornish Jr. were a couple of the early ones, but Josef Newgarden, Charlie Kimball and J.R. Hildebrand are part of a pretty solid wave of young U.S.-born drivers in the series, and there are quite a few more coming through the ranks. In addition, IndyCar has kept ties to USAC/WoO, but built its development system around karts and smaller rear-engined formula cars. There will be a decent group of karting-trained American-born racers in the IndyCar series, but the series has always had an international flavor.

 

Another thing that comes to mind is sponsorship $ in the midst of a recession. What sponsor's going to step up and help an American Indy Car racer establish himself? They'll throw that cash at a Sprint Cup car that will finish 25th, get twice the exposure and cost less. Then, the only new guys that can get rides will be the E.J. Visos and - ptooey! - Milka Dunos of the world.

 

Ovals translate to TV better, but a good natural-terrain road course is pretty solid, too. I prefer ovals, but I like the mix.

The problem is, most ovals in operation today have the stands overbuilt for NASCAR, and so a pretty good crowd of 70,000 at Texas will look like there are a few flies there, because the stands are going to still be more than half-empty, or a decent crowd of 30,000 at Kentucky will have the same impression in 80,000 seats.

Meanwhile, a crowd of 20,000 at St. Petersburg or Barber or Belle Isle can look pretty good on TV because you can hide the seats and there's not going to be a lot of bare aluminum. So, it appears that roadies are the only ones drawing crowds, but it's largely because there are fewer seats at the roadies to have to cover up.

The other problem? They were at the wrong tracks. Michigan, Pocono & Fontana all produced great open-wheel racing. Haven't been at Pocono for decades. Haven't been at Michigan for several years. Finally going back to Fontana after a long absence. Looking forward to Fontana with the current car setup -- if it produces the type of racing that we saw in the Hanford era (as today's Indy hinted it could be), it could be spectacular.

Having a racier car on the road courses helps, too. With Belle Isle coming up on the schedule, it's an important race for keeping momentum, and that happens to be quite possibly the worst street course in North America with about as many passing zones as a one-lane mountain road. If the new car can produce some on-track action and build some momentum going into the Texas night race (IMO the most spectacular race of the year from a TV perspective), momentum can build.

Was watching the I500 (for the second time) and the CC600 tonight simultaneously. The difference between the two isn't even close -- the stock cars look like they're running a pace lap compared to seeing guys running 230mph with multiple on-track passes for the lead and for position deeper in the field.

 

Don't discount the loss of tobacco money when it comes to sponsorship. With Winston having a monopoly on NASCAR, Marlboro, Player's, Kool, Hollywood and several other tobacco companies put their resources into sponsoring open-wheel racing instead. When the tobacco settlement basically banned advertising, racing (both NASCAR and open-wheel) lost a huge sponsorship stream. With that, a lot of teams folded (and the merger was definitely hastened -- certainly one big reason Penske jumped is because Marlboro wanted to be in the Indianapolis 500).

 

Very good points, guys.

Chip, one other thing about sponsorship that I think terminally hinders IndyCar -- simply through the design of the car, it's hard to get anything close to the exposure you can get through sponsoring even a backmarker in NASCAR. You have to have an iconic, simple logo for it to work -- Target being the perfect example. It shows up well.

I think it's less of an issue for F1 and on road courses for IndyCar, when you get more tight shots of the cars. On the ovals, open wheel cars are hard to tell apart, let along make out the sponsors.

 

Yeah, it's a little like MLS in that respect. Games with pretty good attendance looked pathetic in football stadiums. The rise of the soccer-specific stadium has been a big part of their growth. (Pretty much impossible for IndyCar to duplicate that, of course.)

Still, I think the road/street courses generally fare better. Weren't the estimates something like 60k to 80k at Baltimore? Long Beach is typically close to that ballpark. The other road/street races don't match that, but I think they still generally outdraw the ovals outside Texas and Indy.

I think the same holds true on the road courses. They race on some truly awful street courses, but it's a hell of a lot easier to get a crowd to the downtown of a major city than it is to get them to Watkin's Glen. Street courses have terrible racing that typically looks awful on TV. I'd love to see them dump every street race apart from Long Beach and go to places like Laguna Seca, the Glen, Road America, Lime Rock, Portland, etc. There are some great underused road courses in North America, and it's aggravating seeing the premiere open-wheel series in the US stick to city streets.

 

Formula One teams seem to be (slowly) addressing that. Numbers are reappearing on the cars. For a while, the only way to tell teammates apart was by the helmet or the color of the camera mount on top of the roll bar.

 

Did anyone else think that some of the Wheldon stuff was almost too low-rent for words?

"Wear your white sunglasses in tribute to Dan Wheldon on lap 98!"

They looked like 1980s 3D movie glasses, and it made everyone in the speedway putting them on look like a total, tone-deaf fool to the rest of America and the world.

The highlight video of his two wins at Indy followed by the lap by his car were enough. But they even botched that lap. You could hear a pin drop until the car would pass sections of grandstand, and then you would see an emotional, actually respectful cheer go up. But just as it was passing in front of my section, between turns 2 and 3, Brent Musburger starts talking over the P.A. And soon enough, the track announcer was reminding us, again, to, "Put your white Dan Wheldon tribute sunglasses on!!!"

Sometimes less is more. I was embarrassed for the series and the event.