I did the second half of Indy Sprint Week and both Terre Haute and Bloomington had good crowds with people traveling in from outside the area to see the races. Car counts were a little off, but Bloomington had 43 sprints and I can say I've never seen the place that packed. For every person that was in the grandstands there must have been two sitting on the lawn. It was $25 to get in and $2.50 for 16oz barley pop.
"If you don't do it this year, you'll be another year older when you do"
http://www.pbase.com/davidm2
http://www.jacksracephotos.net/
You've hit on it nicely--at short tracks the drivers are interesting and the fans have something in common with them.Originally Posted by irloyal
The midgets of Nationwide not so much. Can you say "your hat's too big?"
Trucks are a niche sport, too, with again not so many name drivers.
No, Sprint Cup is where the name drivers are and are the races those who can save up the money will attend. Otherwise, staying home for local racing is a great alternative.
I could easily attend 6 cup races a year without requiring any more expense outside of gas and food. To date I've flown twice to see "local" short track races in NY and Indiana with multi night stays and rental cars needed for both. At all 6 of the local short tracks I've attended I've seen some very talented "named drivers" compete! I've seen a product far more entertaining than anything I've see Cup produce this year and I've yet to see one driver park his car after one lap because he was milking the system for $$$. I'll take a day at the local track short track any time over Cup!
I did not make the statement however."I would argue..." is not going to suffice...
See how that works
The reality is the numbers are dropping yet you call the deal 'ahead of its time'. The only end result that can be drerived from that is the series will be broke 'ahead of its time'.
If there is such a thing as 'local racing' in one's area.
Corvette Racing - Chevrolet Corvette C6-R#3 Antonio Garcia/Jan Magnussen/Jordan Taylor, #4 Oliver Gavin/Tommy Milner/Richard Westbrook-FC Bayern MunichNeuer - Lahm, Boateng, Dante, Alaba - Martinez, Schweinsteiger - Robben, Muller, Ribery - Mandzukic
ICS tickets are outrageously cheap for a top tier sport. Even Indy is dirt cheap!
My only point is that there are plenty of people spending the same sort of cash - even way more on other sports/activities - so I fail too see how the "economy" really plays in here - or at least in so much as it would have more than a miniscule impact.
Sorry but (IMO) - (I believe) that the split and on going war allowed for OW racing to become a complete farce to the general public. I also (think) that these so called American fans which we want back view OW now as a sissy European sport and will probably never come back to the series. Lets face that perception was always there anyhow - the "farce" that OW became over the last 2 decades and the influx of furriers only made that perception worse.
I do not see a rebound for the sport. I think it's best bet is to stop *looking* for excuses and dial back the costs - at least by half across the board.
Allow me to offer the most prosaic answer: The racing at Chicagoland this past weekend was a minor league product that few fans care about.
Nah, couldn't be.
The Ayn Rand of Indycar
No one had to badge the Offy.
.18 rating for Iowa (254k viewers).
How come F1 beats us and they have no Americans?
I know I sound like a broken record but we need to cut costs and spend somewhere at a Truck series level if not less.
I agree to some point. IndyCar is not the truck series, it is a much more difficult series and the drivers who strap on an IndyCar have a lot more nerve, and require a stronger set of skills than racing trucks.
IMHO:
I think that IICS needs to cut back to a strong 12 - 16 race series with diversity. 3 or 4 Big Ovals (1.5 M+); 3 or 4 small ovals (1.25 M-); and 5 to 8 road courses (street and nat terrain) MAXIMUM. IICS needs less overhead, to reduce the need of the 1.5M$ fee to be profitable. IICS needs to develop a strong relationship with SMI and a couple of other promotors to strengthen their positioning at specific venues. IICS needs to get rid of the socialized racing model and require a minimum purse from promotors and provide a decent year end payout for the top 20 to 24 participant drivers. IICS needs to allow purchases as well as leases for engines. Finally, the IICS needs a strong companion series like ALMS; Trucks; or something that can provide a real destination for some drivers and a place to allow the "Big Dogs" to drop into once in a while to allow the "Big Dogs" a chance to race some more.
In the "Hey Day", USAC stocks, ARCA (yes ARCA), and the occasional NASCAR foray as well as LeMans, Rolex and Sebring were destinations for the IndyCar pilots and of course there was crossover from the other series to IndyCars as well.
But, like I've said before, American Open wheel has had a pretty good 100 year run, and maybe we are seeing the decline and disapperance in our lifetime. Maybe we'll wake up in a few years and all that will be left is a few street events and an Indy 500 of some sort of prototype/open wheel.
...Always follow the money
fewer races mean they'll need to earn big money during those races. They'll need huge crowds at those events.
How do you make that happen?
I say more races.
Even cutting team budgets in half means they'll still each need ~$4million each. To accomplish that with sponsorships, you'll need to show sponsor's value. "Look at how less often were racing!" is NOT the best sales pitch out there.
Another cool thing about "local track racing" is that the cars are pretty modular and it doesn't cost a large fortune to fix them after a wreck.
The "no cautions" thing in NASCAR is IMHO an attempt to keep costs down--just listen to Tony Stewart talk about "tearing up a bunch of racecars." THIS is the "economy," too.
And yet more people watch and there are more sponsors today than in the 70's and 80's.
IndyCar has start and park too, or didn't you see the Lotus fiasco at Indy? They made a bunch of money.
At every other venue the Start and Parkers do something a little differetly in IndyCar. They stay home, leaving much smaller fields. Yay!
I forget which thread it was but I recently posted a rundown of a Busch (NNS) race from approx 20 years ago and I think over 75% of the cars had nationally known companies on the fenders.
Id guess 75% dont now.
Hard to use the 70s races as a comparison. Those drivers were literally weekend warriors back then. A completely different series in the 70s. It wasnt even called the Busch Series until 1982.
Even Winston Cup teams were still getting the local Ford/Chevy/Chrysler dealer to cough up some green to cover the rear fenders back then.
People went nuts when Jr Johnson got Holly Farms to sponsor his team because a non-automotive sponsor was still a rarity
Faster than a bullet from a gun
He is faster than everyone
Quicker than the blinking of an eye
Like a flash you could miss him going by
No one knows quite how he does it but it's true they say
He's the master of going faster. -George Harrison
And now sponsors routinely write 7 figure checks while 1-3 million people watch each race on national television. Live.
The way some describe it here... you'd think it was like a prizefighter who gets hit over and over and over again.... and winds up looking better than he did when he started!
I would love to a have business I own fail like NNS is failing, in some folks eyes.
Quite the failure!
Im sure the sanctioning body is doing fine.
And its not a problem getting the 7 figure sponsor if you have a Cup driver in your seat
But many of the teams are in trouble.
The once proud Busch/Nationwide Series is a shell of its former self. Once March rolled around, they would hit the road and separate from Cup and have quite a sizable stand-alone schedule. They get decent ratings (GoDaddy factor?) but the stands,e ven on a Cup piggyback weekend are awful IRL@Phoenix bad.
Odd that a track like Chicagoland (which has a Cup date) would take the risk to have a standalone N'wide race. The crowd was embarrassingly small. With the Brickyard less than a week later, could that have had an effect? Why go to boring cookie-cutter Joliet when 6 days later you could see the N'wide series at IMS instead. Of course we all assume IMS will be a dud for the N'wide cars too, but in a choice between the two facilities, people would certainly chose IMS over Joliet.
The bigger problem is that it lacks identity, other than being a "Cup warmup" or "Cup Jr." Part of it goes back yrs. to letting Cup drivers and teams run some of the races. Bigger issue is that 90% of NNS races are simply Cup support races. There's no South Boston, Nashville (either one), Hickory etc. venurs that are unique and separate from Cup.
"Many people always ask me why I sign off 'Until we meet again.' Because goodbye is so final.
Goodbye, Dan Wheldon."
Marty Reid, Oct. 16, 2011
Whoa. Have you seen Phoenix NNS attendance, for one example? Marlo Klain's wedding thinks it's empty.
Better than the 80's? Sure. The 90's? Not buying it.
I meant in terms of TV viewers. There weren't millions of people watching it back then. There are now. Epic fail, no?
I'd like to get actual concrete numbers on that, but sure, more TV eyeballs. With sparser attendance and 5-10 S&P's.
Me too!
They didn't have anything close to the TV exposure back then that they have now though.
There is no way there are more sponsors today in the Nationwide series then there was in the 70's and 80's. Today you've got 12 to 14 teams that have little or no sponsorship on the car and can't afford to run more than a set of tire for the weekend. In the 70 and 80 the Sportsman and Busch series had 50+ cars showing up to race, yes race the whole darn race. I can't tell you how many people I took to a Sportsman or BGN race as their first exposure to NASCAR back then. Today it would be the last thing I try and do if I wanted to get them interested in the sport.
In 1977 I could roll into a NASCAR Sportsman race with a Banjo tube-frame copy on an open air hauler, buy a new set of tires, and qualify for the show if we got the set-up right. My sponsor was a Chevy dealer in Douglasville, and an Atlanta area auto glass shop. These two basically paid to paint the car, give us gas for the hauler, supplied some cash for go-fast parts and paid most of the tire bills. We had an owner who worked the jack, crew chief/mechanic who was the owners brother, a few tire-wipers who helped to put in gas and change tires. The car was housed in a pole barn/garage at the owners farm. I got 50% of the purse for driving and earned all of $9000 in 1977 (which was decent money back then). You couldn't even afford a trailer today on what the team spent on a full season back then.
Sorry... sponsor $$$ is what I was referring to. Not the actual qty of sponsors.
There were alot of fully funded GN teams back then. Dozens.
And they were for the most part independent GN teams too, not RoushHendrickGibbs teams assembled to get their latest 18 year old some seat time
Part of the problem is a fair amount of the really good sponsor dollars are going to the Cup teams, so you have Mega teams taking the good sponsors
and independent teams having to shut the doors
And the NNS regualrs typically dont get a sniff at the top payouts almost every week because of the cubic dollars behind the Cup teams
A financial double whammy
Dont forget the total # of sponsor dollars was less back then.
You could run Cup for $5M in those days. So Busch was probably a 1-2 million dollar check for the full schedule
But Im gonna guess the Saturday series as a whole was more stable and healthy back then
Last edited by KevMcNJ; 07-26-2012 at 06:24 PM.
Watching today's BY400 on a French relay via the internet and observing the easily noticeable downturn in attendance, I am more convinced that the flat American economy is the biggest single factor in that negative. It seems to me the majority of the missing fans are those who must travel the furthest to attend; that would also explain the various reports of very low numbers camping out around the Speedway days before the race this year.
I also believe that local, short track attendance staying stout at some tracks now further proves that contraction is occurring and that race fans are sticking closer to home because of the stagnant economy. That local short track being at the very foundation of the sport, when its attendance begins to suffer significantly it will be because the canary long before died.
I think alot of the short track fans have thrown their hands up and said "ENOUGH!" so perhaps part of your argument is valid
also,
I think a depressing # of todays NASCAR Cup fans have never been to a short track so Im gonna assume they arent going to Hometown Speedway instead of Charlotte, Chicagoland, Bristol etc
But at the same time many short tracks are in dire shape in 2012. They are closing or shutting the season down early at an alarming rate this year. there was a time when they were closing down becasue a developer wanted the land. Now it seems like they close down and just sit there
Last edited by KevMcNJ; 07-29-2012 at 08:11 PM.
They still get PAID via the TV contracts to hold a NASCAR race. Don't forget who owns the track.... How much money does IMS make running the Freedom 100 in front of 500 fans.?Granted it costs a lot t ojust open a facility of that size, but they have far less of everything at a Nationwide race, so the costs aren't anywhere near equal to a Cup race.
Yes, it is the economy. Think about just the fuel costs alone of a 300 mile round trip in the average SUV, let alone a class A motorhome or any RV so common at NASCAR events for that matter. Nationwide crowds are miserable at most of their stand alone events
I think that the BY400 weekend shows just how much the economy has impacted Major Auto Racing. IMS was a ghost town for Friday and Saturday, as well as the ARCA event at IRP. In the flush years of 2002 - 2007, the City was packed with racing fans, IRP overflowed and IMS was stuffed. The NASCAR Sportsman and Grand Am race was set-up in an attempt to generate more excitement for a year that was thought to a problem for attendance. IMS knew that this year was gonna be a tough one, so they gambled. I hope it pays off in the coming years and it probably will if the economy can turn around after this fall, but it sure didn't this year.
It's not really surprising that the oval races in both IndyCar & NASCAR have gotten hit harder than the road & street courses since they seem to draw from different demographics.
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