Drivers reject TMS boss' oval push

[evo5_mat]

TAKEN FROM AUTOSPORT
Seems like the arguments are starting between drivers and track owners now, with the drivers suprisingly wanting street and road courses, even the more established IRL drivers


Drivers reject TMS boss' oval push

By Jeff Olson Saturday, June 7th 2008, 07:32 GMT


Leading IRL IndyCar Series drivers have dismissed Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage's suggestion that the championship should stick to ovals for the majority of its schedule.

On Thursday, Gossage said IndyCar's success depended on its schedule remaining "80 percent" oval-based.

Initially an all-oval category, the IRL has steadily introduced more road and street course events since adding St Petersburg, Sears Point and Watkins Glen to its schedule in 2005.

The merger with the Champ Car World Series is set to result in a more event balance of ovals and road circuits in future years - a concept Gossage criticised.

"IndyCar officials have to understand that it will take 80 percent ovals to truly succeed," Gossage told espn.com. "Otherwise, this is nothing more than a niche sport. If they're comfortable with that, fine, but I don't think they are. The Indy 500 and high-speed ovals like TMS are why the IRL won this war."

Some driver scorned his comments, while others simply brushed them off.

"If that's the way he feels, then we shouldn't race here," Tony Kanaan said. "It amazes me that he said that. If somebody who has such good vision and can organise a race as good as this thinks we should be racing on 80 percent ovals, (then he) isn't looking out for the series' best interests. He's looking out for his own interests. We don't need those people around if that's the way they think."

Series points leader and Indianapolis 500 winner Scott Dixon smiled when told of Gossage's opinion.

"Eddie should stick to running his track and let the series run itself," Dixon said. "He's probably a little biased because he's got an oval. Everybody is going to have different views. I'm biased because I like road courses. He's just putting that out there because he and his owners (Speedway Motorsports Inc.) have a long list of racetracks, and most of them are ovals."

Gossage said he is concerned that the IndyCar Series, in the wake of unification with the former Champ Car Series, is preparing to move heavily toward road and street courses.

"Along with all the good this merger brings, the IRL also had to absorb some bad from Champ Car," Gossage said.

"They had to take on some baggage with the transition. But the American public has made it very clear they will not accept European-style road racing. It's not even an arguable point. It's a fact. I'm telling you that would be a big mistake."

The series added street races in Long Beach and Edmonton to its 2008 schedule, making the count 11 ovals, three road courses and four street courses.

The Surfers Paradise and Toronto street courses are also expected to join the calendar in 2009, bringing more balance while possibly threatening some of the weaker oval races.

"If you can go to places where they draw big crowds, I don't know why they would all have to be ovals," Dixon said. "The vibe is with street races."

Other drivers, like Vitor Meira, said the series should maintain ovals as at least 50 percent of the total.

"That's where we have been successful and NASCAR has been successful," Meira said. "We've proven that the American fan likes it, and that's our fan base. It's more entertaining.

"I'm talking only about the business side of it. I'm taking myself out of the equation, because, man, it's dangerous. You can get hurt much easier on ovals. Personally, I'd like to see us race less on ovals, but you have to. Fifty percent of it has to be ovals."

Still others, like Ed Carpenter, leaned more toward Gossage's line of thinking.

"I'm not going to lie; I wouldn't mind if it was all ovals," Carpenter said. "If there were more promoters like Eddie Gossage at the other ovals, that would be an easier decision to make. The problem we have is that a lot of road and street races are profitable events for everybody, but you can't say that about all of the oval events we go to."

Champ Car attempted to race at Texas Motor Speedway in 2001 but cancelled the race when drivers reported bouts of vertigo and some feared losing consciousness as speeds approached 240 mph. Justin Wilson, who circled the 24-degree banking for the first time on Thursday night, said racing at TMS is a daunting challenge for newcomers.

"I can't imagine going 20 mph faster than what we're doing now," Justin Wilson said. "It's already crazy fast. I can understand why they were passing out. You can definitely feel the strains and the G-forces compressing in. It's different to the other tracks we've raced on, where the Gs are lateral. You start to feel the effect."

[Wilf]

TAKEN FROM AUTOSPORT
Seems like the arguments are starting between drivers and track owners now, with the drivers suprisingly wanting street and road courses, even the more established IRL drivers


Drivers reject TMS boss' oval push

By Jeff Olson Saturday, June 7th 2008, 07:32 GMT

The merger with the Champ Car World Series is set to result in a more event balance of ovals and road circuits in future years - a concept Gossage criticised.

I have never been able to understand why the IRL capitulated and agreed to be merged into the Champ Car World Series.

[ShiftingGears]

I'm glad someones dismissed his claim. An 80% oval series would be ****, to put it frankly.

[Albert D. Kallal]

It is quite hard to to argue that when champ car (CART) had ratings and audiences as large as NASCAR and that is WHEN we had a mix street and road course and ovals.

When I was watching champ car in the early nineties, I remember I wasn’t too thrilled about the ovals, but I did like a few of them, and of course there was also the Indy 500. On the other hand, there was a solid core group of fans that really loved oval racing, and I thought having ovals was really great for those fans.

On the other hand, many fans liked the road racing. Thus, you had two large groups of people to draw from to make up the fan base. In other words, you had a mix of types of courses, and that allowed you to get both type of fans enjoying and watching the sport.

Right now they’re adding a few more road courses and street courses to the series next year, and I think it will really help the fan base to grow. Goodness for bid, with all ovals, the IRL fan base was going nowhere.

If past history is any indication, a good mix of the type of events is what made CART/champ car rival NASCAR, and even other series around the world in terms of prestige and fan base. (and money too).

The fact that the IRL absorbed a few champ car teams will do absolutely nothing for the fan base ( and sponsorship revenues) if IRL does not deliver a product that much of the open wheel fan base was comprised of **WHEN** it was very successful.

I could never understand this mentality when people say will champ car went bankrupt means that we should not have street/road veneus. yes, they did some things really stupid and poorly, but it does not deny the fact that when CART was doing very well, it had a correct mix of fan base and types of racing courses.

I can remember when apple came out with the Newton, it was a handheld PDA, and it was an absolute market disaster. However the concept of a PDA was a really good idea, and when the palm company came along, every businessman had to have a PDA ( personal digital assistant or electronic daytimer). So, the isssues of a good idea and good racing mix has little relationship to that CART/champ car does not exist anymore.

And no question that some owners of ovals are concerned that they could lose their venues, and that is a rightfully correct concern for them to have.

However it seems to me that if past histories is an indication, when open wheel was doing the best, it was doing so with a pretty much the even mix between the ovals, street, and road courses.

I think this direction will do nothing but help the IRL to grow...

Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com

[wedge]

Obviously it should be a mixture of disciplines but Eddie Gossage is protecting his own interests when TMS could lose out in the future.

[JimmyStephans]

I think Eddie is correct -- in the long term.

The sports needs cold hard cash to survive and grow and expand. There are more revenue streams from ovals.

Here we are in 2008 and the public has many, many entertainment options. Digital TV with hundreds of stations, Internet sites from forums like this to myspace.com with 73 million members, live entertainment is everywhere -- I split my time between ST Petersburg, FL and Denver, CO.... weekly the newspapers in both are packed full of interesting and entertaining things I can select from.... food festivals, local car and bike races, all sorts of stick and ball sports, and concert after concert after concert, and much more.

IndyCar can entertain the average citizen in just two ways (and thus capture dollars from same). Live at the track or on TV.

Live at the track... some road course venues can sell 30,000 tickets just like some ovals can, but not as many.

Lets call that even... but, lets look closer....

The average fan on a huge road course like Road America buys his ticket, maybe pays to park his car or pays a tad more to park his camper, and makes a weekend out of it.... OFTEN eating food and drinking beer he brought from home.

That same fan, if at an oval, likely isn't bringing his own food and beer. He buys it at the track.

More income for the track in the long term means more for the racers. Bigger purses, etc.

Jump over to the souvenir sales.... At an oval all the cash and credit card carrying fans are condensed into a smaller and more controlled area and can be funneled past the souvenir trailers and booths. Its not the same as on a spread out road course like Road America.

More income for the track in the long term means more for the racers. Bigger purses, etc. And, in the case of souvenirs, more income for the teams and drivers, means more racing and long term success. SIDEBAR: The more souvenirs in circulation, like on little Johnny's ball cap, the more popular the sport slowly becomes. I myself became a racing fan in the early seventies because some other kid in the 6th grade brought some silly red STP stickers to school his dad got at some track. I just had to see who this Granatelli guy was.

Next let us look at advertising -- which through team, driver, event and track sponsorships is king in this sport.

On the cars.... face it, on an oval each car / team sponsor gets more airtime because the cars are grouped tighter... even the cars a lap down end up on TV screen all across America many times during a race because of the tight confines and TV angles and passing. On a road course, less TV time value for the sponsors.

At the track... Same deal. The cost to place a sign along the track at Road America is much less than at Vegas or Texas... why? Simply because the signs at turn two at Road America are shown on TV just a tiny percentage of the time compared to turn two at Vegas. If the tracks can charge more for the advertising signs they have more revenue to increases purses AND to promote the event in the first place. Additionally, those advertising signs in turn two at Vegas are seen all race by the fans in attendence, whereas those in turn two at Road America are viewed by considerably less people, making them less valuable.

On TV... We all know advertising drives TV. The more viewers ESPN / ABC can get watching the more they can charge for advertisements. The more they can gain in revenue the more the IRL can charge for broadcast rights, etc. That of course means that the we as current fans, and the IRL as a sport / business, need to bring in more fans, period.

Oval racing is more fan friendly and TV friendly. Fan friendly because its easy to understand... bunch of guys in fast cars going in a circle for 500 miles, trying to stay in front without crashing and burning, first guy to finish spins donuts, kisses the girl, takes home the most money! Its condensed and easy and entertaining TO NEW FANS on TV and will provide more growth in the long term.

Road courses are tactical, daring and interesting to US -- the people already into IndyCar / CART / F-1 -- but they DO NOT capture new fans that are turning through TV stations on a Sunday afternoon. They do not "grab" the remote from a channel surfer's hand the way a tight oval race, like last night with sparks flying, can. They do not have the power to keep that channel surfer away from American Idol.

Growth in IndyCar will only come from capturing NEW FANS, like NASCAR has done over the last 20 years, not by continuing to service the desires of us old school fans or the drivers themselves.

The truth is that right now NASCAR is king. Unlike 20 years ago it has fans outside the south, it has buckets of female fans, and many more minority fans than it has ever had. The teenage girls that work for me know who Jeff Gordan, Kasey Khane and Kyle Busch are... and so do the boyfriends and little brothers... But when I pointed out Dan Wheldon to two of those same girls in Downtown ST Pete a couple of years ago they had no idea who I was talking about.

Those girls, their boyfriends, and eventually their kids are who we need to capture in the long term to make IndyCar grow. Ovals give us a better chance. Today's youth has the shortest attention span you could imagine. If we don't grab them in milleseconds we often don't get a second chance.

Ovals tend to be more fan friendly and convienent. They are closer to big towns, they have better parking, and it "feels" familar, like going to an NFL game or other stadium event. In Kansas they can get fans to drive west 30-40 minutes to the IRL oval, but not another few miles past that to the Topeka road course where they can see a dozen or more races on an SCCA weekened for less money.

We are "selling" our sport to new people here... thats it, new people... if we want it to grow.

Marketing Guru Clotaire Rapaille teaches us that sales are generated by the process of "lustification and justification". Lustification is the psychological trigger of desire that makes our audience want to buy the product, while justification is merely the rational excuse used to expend resources.

Sparks flying and wheels touching at 200 MPH on that tight oval in Texas creates more "Lust" in the people that are not current fans than the beautiful back ground of Road America.

Having the oval just down the highway, with easy parking, decent food, and a dare devil motorcycle jump, and being able to see the whole track helps "justify" the expenditure for the teenager or 20 something more so than a four hour drive to a grass parking lot on a one lane road, or the crazy bus ride / parking schemes at places like ST Pete and Long Beach.

60-90 minutes after last night's Texas race some new fan was telling his buddies at the bar back in town all about his first IndyCar race and how he couldn't wait to go again, while convincing them all they should get tickets next year too.

60-90 minutes after many road course / street course races some guy is on his cell phone bitching about the long drive home or the crazy traffic patterns or bus rides.

A big part of "lustification" is the excitement, and a big part of "justification" is how easy it is to go see that excitement.

Auto racing in all forms has always been a world of copycats. Penske comes out with new trick mirrors on their cars, the next week everybody has them. Wings, shocks, driver helmets, and on and on.... "it" is all copied from one to the next, and in the end it comes down to who can execute "it" the best.

The bottom line is that the IRL -- as sad as it may be to us old school USAC / CART / IRL fans -- would be doing itself a huge favor by listening to promoters like Eddie and following closely the path of NASCAR.... Major percentage of ovals on TV / sponsor / advertiser / fan friendly tracks, with a tiny bit of road course / street course action tossed in now and then.

Jimmy

[MDS]

That same fan, if at an oval, likely isn't bringing his own food and beer. He buys it at the track.

Have you ever been to an oval? Tailgating is a long standing tradition at the NASCAR races I go to. Its why I arrive at the track five hours early or camp out at Talledaga. Every oval I've attended has allowed fans to bring in their own beverages. Even after 9-11 when they had a pointless no hard-sided cooler rule fans still brought beer, often crappy domestic beer, in large clear plastic bags, sold at the speedway, with ice.

I always bring food and beverage to the track whether it is oval, road or street.

I'm going to Nashville for the IRL race next year and I'll be taligating there too. Stop by, I'll have some chicken and burgers on the grill and some beers, good imported stuff, in the cooler.

[Yankee Racer]

12 oval, 12 road/street/airport sounds reasonable to me. Oval racing may seem better to fans right now, but that's because the IRL isn't at the right road/street/airport courses. I wouldn't mind having more ovals than road/street/airport circuits, though, if the schedule was longer. However, 80% is too much. If you had a 25 race schedule, that would be 20 ovals. I could handle 60%, 15 and 10, but it's all about going to the right ovals and the right road/street/airport circuits. There's a difference between places like Michigan, Texas, Milwaukee, Road America, Mid-Ohio, and Laguna Seca and places like Motegi, Kansas, and Infineon.

Oh, and Ed Carpenter only agrees because he's a **** road course racer. (Nothing against him, he's doing a great job this year).

[Albert D. Kallal]

I tend to disagree somewhat with the idea that the fans will spend less money because they’ve traveled, or staying there for three days at some permanent tracks as opposed to what fans do at an oval.

Road America is not the best example, because you’re talking about a large spread out natural terrain course.

When you take tracks like Portland international raceway, or even the Cleveland race at the airport, then those venues are not usually spread out, and you usually have the same type of concentration of grandstands, and vendors that you would get an oval.

Furthermore, those fans are spending three days there, not just one day like on an oval. In Edmonton, some of the vendors stuff are nearly sold out the first day by Friday noon, and they still had two days left of sales to go. This is the same experience I had when I went to the Vancouver races for 10 years in a row. There was even a big contingent of Brazil fans, and they would take out a whole huge table in the beer gardens and drink all day until the race or practice sessions were on. they had 3 full days of sales.

From a vendor pointed view, these permanent type tracks, are better than what you would have at an oval because they get a good solid three days of sales.

However, I do agree with your points about signage, TV coverage, ease for the fans to enjoy and understand the racing, and a host of other number of issues. In this regards, I agree that ovals are somewhat better in this regards. Another significant point that you’re not really pressed too hard on is the fact that ovals are simply way less costly to run and maintain, especially when you compare to any temp course. So from a cost point of view, ovals are a better bet.

In fact the biggest downfall of some of these temporary courses like Cleveland or Edmonton is in the high cost of setting up the race for the event. Ovals don’t have this huge cost problem, and therefore once again are generally a more profitable bet to make.

However, it is a question of the fan base. NASCAR shown you can build a fan base from ovals, but unfortunately open wheel racing is not the same kind of racing, and therefore not really all rules apply much the same ( the rules for sponsorship and signage and exposure at ovals up lives to be the same, but how the fans view and see the racing is a different matter altogether). While the oval might be more fan friendly, the problem is you can’t get the fans to go when talking about oval racing.

I guess the question is the three days of fans at these road events worth more then one day at an oval? When you add up the total over those three days, then most of these road/street events actually out draw the ovals by a good amount.

Without question if you can make ovals work, then they’re probably a better way to get fans and keep the industry healthy ( there’s no question is more bang for the buck).

The problem is ovals have had difficulty in getting a good number of fans, and I’m not sure if it’s really the ovals problem, or just the fact that open wheel racing has been weakened so much.

However, I think any event that is well run, promoted well, and it’s *consistently* kept for the same weekend year after year is the way to grow a race. NASCAR’s done that.

Each time a event date is moved, you REALLY mess things up. Moving the Edmonton date again is bad. I think it’s always a mistake to do that.

The long-term races like the Australian race probably gets nearly as many fans as F1, and in fact draws the same numbers as the Indy 500 if you take every day starting from the Tuesday to the Sunday. Cleveland was really successful the last few years also. The same goes for long-term races like Toronto.

So I do agree that the exposure and TV rights and a few other issues do seem to tend to favor ovals a little bit, but on the other hand look at the tv ratings for F1 (so you can have big ratings for great for racing is based on just mostly street and road courses at the end of the day).

The fact matters as some of these long-term events like Toronto introduces more people to racing because it’s right in the city. In my cases I’ve introduced several people into racing very much because of this issue. In fact in the case of Edmonton, I know some people that happen to be traveling in town, and looked at all this excitement, and then decided to go to the race. I can guarantee that if this was some oval track on the outskirts of the city, these people likely would not taken the time to go (in fact that not sure I would've myself taken the time). In many ways these events are more fan friendly because the people don’t have to traveled a long distance to get to those tracks. (and, people are parking thier campers right now due to high fuel costs).

I guess the problem is some of these events have built up a lot of fans over the years, and I think the IRL should simply try to take advantage of these venues that work.

From what I can see that’s exactly what the IRL is doing anyway…

Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
kallal@msn.com

[Dr. Krogshöj]

Eddie's 80-20 proposal stirred up controversy just like the 1/3-1/3-1/3 proposal did over at TrackForum. It seems only the 50-50 scenario could please bost sides.