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turbolc2

Support Races??

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Now that it looks like I am getting a F1 race about an hour and a half from my house I can finally go to a Formula 1 race.

I was wondering, how many support races are there on a typical Sunday?

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It all depends on where a F1 race is held. For instance in Australia there's the V8 Supercars as a support race, but in other countries it's different. You'll probably find there's more support races on the Saturday than the Sunday.

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Now that it looks like I am getting a F1 race about an hour and a half from my house I can finally go to a Formula 1 race.

I was wondering, how many support races are there on a typical Sunday?

I don't think there will be as many support races at Austin than there are at some European tracks simply due to the lack of formula series allowed to run alongside F1. Look at Montréal, for example...they're very limited on support races this year (I believe they have a total of three).

If I had to guess, Austin will feature a historical F1 series and U.S. Formula 2000 without much else. Almost all of the junior formula in the United States (Star Mazda, for example) are now under IndyCar's racing ladder and I don't think they will be keen on letting their series support F1. I remember Formula BMW Americas at Indy...too bad Bobby Rahal ran the series into the ground and it no longer exists.

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Can only echo the words of above, but in terms of Europe (for anyone interest or doesn't know!) it's GP2, GP3, Formula BMW Europe and Porsche Super Cup. All great series, sometimes the support race action is better than the F1 race itself. Oh, and at the British GP last year, they had one other. World Sports Car Masters, for Le Mans cars from the 1970 period.

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I don't think there will be as many support races at Austin than there are at some European tracks simply due to the lack of formula series allowed to run alongside F1. Look at Montréal, for example...they're very limited on support races this year (I believe they have a total of three).

If I had to guess, Austin will feature a historical F1 series and U.S. Formula 2000 without much else. Almost all of the junior formula in the United States (Star Mazda, for example) are now under IndyCar's racing ladder and I don't think they will be keen on letting their series support F1. I remember Formula BMW Americas at Indy...too bad Bobby Rahal ran the series into the ground and it no longer exists.

I am as excited as a school girl here. Indy and Canada were just too far and too expensive for me to go. Historical F1 would be cool, I love the old cars. I like them probably more than the new cars. Formula 2000 is good. Thanks for the replies.

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Can only echo the words of above, but in terms of Europe (for anyone interest or doesn't know!) it's GP2, GP3, Formula BMW Europe and Porsche Super Cup. All great series, sometimes the support race action is better than the F1 race itself. Oh, and at the British GP last year, they had one other. World Sports Car Masters, for Le Mans cars from the 1970 period.

Do y'all think that's why F1 is not as big in the US as it is in Europe? Lack of education on the public's part and lack of PR from the FIA? How anyone can watch a bunch of stock cars turn left all day is beyond my scope of reason when compared to the sheer technical spectacle of F1.

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I am as excited as a school girl here. Indy and Canada were just too far and too expensive for me to go. Historical F1 would be cool, I love the old cars. I like them probably more than the new cars. Formula 2000 is good. Thanks for the replies.

I know, I am in the same situation but in my case the race I will have close to me is the Indycar Baltimore Grand Prix but who knows if I can make it to Texas even if I have to go driving from here :P

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Do y'all think that's why F1 is not as big in the US as it is in Europe? Lack of education on the public's part and lack of PR from the FIA? How anyone can watch a bunch of stock cars turn left all day is beyond my scope of reason when compared to the sheer technical spectacle of F1.

Interesting question. For sure Formula One could do a lot more in the North America to say "look at this!" instead of accepting that in most people's eyes, they'd rather watch NASCAR. I think that's a problem F1 has had in North America, they'd had no real drive to get their and promote the sport better. But I guess that it'd take an awful lot of promotion to fight against the way NASCAR is promoted and to get NASCAR fans to notice Formula One.

I think another issue F1 has is that for North American fans, there isn't a home-grown driver or team to support. Here in Britain, we've had two back to back world champions and multiple teams who are British and more than half the teams competing are currently based in Britain. That has really helped the sport get out of the low point, you could say, of the Schumacher domination years. US F1 was a chance to change that, but as I have outlined in other posts, teams in America are really in a catch-22 situation currently, based on the fact that due to the lack of promotion of the sport, hardly any of the big companies want to be behind these teams and sponsor them. That says a lot when companies based in one of the biggest markets in the world don't want to sponsor F1 teams based in America.

Getting it on a mainstream channel would be a big help too. I mean, I'm not an expect on how F1 and NASCAR are shown in America in terms of what channels they are on and how you get those channels, by subcribing or if they are simply free. If NASCAR is shown on a channel everyone can get whilst F1 is shown on SPEED, F1 has no hope really. Only a few sporadic racing fans are going to subscribe to something like SPEED, which won't help get it noticed compared to Formula One. Again, comparing to Britain, Formula One has benefitted enormously by being on channels every house hold in Britian can get, first with ITV and then BBC in recent history. If it was on something like Eurosports or Sky Sports, then the current number of people watching would drop despite the success Britain has had in the sport. I personally wouldn't be able to watch anymore if that was the case.

And lastly, the buzz topic in F1 recently. Improving the show. I agree with you on the point of "technical spectacle of F1" I was a fan of KERS and I'm sad to see things like the f-duct and the double diffuser are getting banned, it seems innovation itself is getting outlawed. But, for many people, the technical aspect won't put bums on seats in grandstands. For the most part, the casual fans want to see races like we saw most recently in Turkey. That was a perfect case to show how good F1 can really be. But we need more races like that more often for fan numbers to increase. I believe that is perhaps why NASCAR is so popular in the States, cars can follow closely and overtaking is pretty much constant. In my mind, F1 needs to mix exciting innovations with exciting racing, much like sportscar racing does so spectacularly.

Sorry for the long a## post, hope you've managed to survive it!

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I don't think there will be as many support races at Austin than there are at some European tracks simply due to the lack of formula series allowed to run alongside F1. Look at Montréal, for example...they're very limited on support races this year (I believe they have a total of three).

If I had to guess, Austin will feature a historical F1 series and U.S. Formula 2000 without much else. Almost all of the junior formula in the United States (Star Mazda, for example) are now under IndyCar's racing ladder and I don't think they will be keen on letting their series support F1. I remember Formula BMW Americas at Indy...too bad Bobby Rahal ran the series into the ground and it no longer exists.

Basically, I believe you are right. Nevertheless, if they are to make Austin a success both FOM and Full Throttle need to make as much of a spectacle of the event as they can. Personally, and with regret, I don't think this whole thing will fly.

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Interesting question. For sure Formula One could do a lot more in the North America to say "look at this!" instead of accepting that in most people's eyes, they'd rather watch NASCAR. I think that's a problem F1 has had in North America, they'd had no real drive to get their and promote the sport better. But I guess that it'd take an awful lot of promotion to fight against the way NASCAR is promoted and to get NASCAR fans to notice Formula One.

I think another issue F1 has is that for North American fans, there isn't a home-grown driver or team to support. Here in Britain, we've had two back to back world champions and multiple teams who are British and more than half the teams competing are currently based in Britain. That has really helped the sport get out of the low point, you could say, of the Schumacher domination years. US F1 was a chance to change that, but as I have outlined in other posts, teams in America are really in a catch-22 situation currently, based on the fact that due to the lack of promotion of the sport, hardly any of the big companies want to be behind these teams and sponsor them. That says a lot when companies based in one of the biggest markets in the world don't want to sponsor F1 teams based in America.

Getting it on a mainstream channel would be a big help too. I mean, I'm not an expect on how F1 and NASCAR are shown in America in terms of what channels they are on and how you get those channels, by subcribing or if they are simply free. If NASCAR is shown on a channel everyone can get whilst F1 is shown on SPEED, F1 has no hope really. Only a few sporadic racing fans are going to subscribe to something like SPEED, which won't help get it noticed compared to Formula One. Again, comparing to Britain, Formula One has benefitted enormously by being on channels every house hold in Britian can get, first with ITV and then BBC in recent history. If it was on something like Eurosports or Sky Sports, then the current number of people watching would drop despite the success Britain has had in the sport. I personally wouldn't be able to watch anymore if that was the case.

And lastly, the buzz topic in F1 recently. Improving the show. I agree with you on the point of "technical spectacle of F1" I was a fan of KERS and I'm sad to see things like the f-duct and the double diffuser are getting banned, it seems innovation itself is getting outlawed. But, for many people, the technical aspect won't put bums on seats in grandstands. For the most part, the casual fans want to see races like we saw most recently in Turkey. That was a perfect case to show how good F1 can really be. But we need more races like that more often for fan numbers to increase. I believe that is perhaps why NASCAR is so popular in the States, cars can follow closely and overtaking is pretty much constant. In my mind, F1 needs to mix exciting innovations with exciting racing, much like sportscar racing does so spectacularly.

Sorry for the long a## post, hope you've managed to survive it!

I did and I think you are right about everything you said here, F1 should be in national TV if they want to get people's attention here you can only get it on Speed and for 3 races in the year F1 will be on ABC I think but it won't be live, FOM should address this ASAP if they want to make this whole US GP stuff work, as they are building a new track for this race they can make it with pently of overtaking places and wide enough so drivers can have more than one racing line without compromising speed and what I really think it would help F1 here is having at least 3 races in a year in USA, this country is almost as big as Europe and one race is not enough for the amount of people living here, you can have the Texas, Indy and NY GPs and who knows if a Florida one can be on cards now that people are talking about 24 races ina year and I heard about some people who wants to have a US team in F1, that could help a lot but only one race IMO will never works.

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Interesting question. For sure Formula One could do a lot more in the North America to say "look at this!" instead of accepting that in most people's eyes, they'd rather watch NASCAR. I think that's a problem F1 has had in North America, they'd had no real drive to get their and promote the sport better. But I guess that it'd take an awful lot of promotion to fight against the way NASCAR is promoted and to get NASCAR fans to notice Formula One.

I think another issue F1 has is that for North American fans, there isn't a home-grown driver or team to support. Here in Britain, we've had two back to back world champions and multiple teams who are British and more than half the teams competing are currently based in Britain. That has really helped the sport get out of the low point, you could say, of the Schumacher domination years. US F1 was a chance to change that, but as I have outlined in other posts, teams in America are really in a catch-22 situation currently, based on the fact that due to the lack of promotion of the sport, hardly any of the big companies want to be behind these teams and sponsor them. That says a lot when companies based in one of the biggest markets in the world don't want to sponsor F1 teams based in America.

Getting it on a mainstream channel would be a big help too. I mean, I'm not an expect on how F1 and NASCAR are shown in America in terms of what channels they are on and how you get those channels, by subcribing or if they are simply free. If NASCAR is shown on a channel everyone can get whilst F1 is shown on SPEED, F1 has no hope really. Only a few sporadic racing fans are going to subscribe to something like SPEED, which won't help get it noticed compared to Formula One. Again, comparing to Britain, Formula One has benefitted enormously by being on channels every house hold in Britian can get, first with ITV and then BBC in recent history. If it was on something like Eurosports or Sky Sports, then the current number of people watching would drop despite the success Britain has had in the sport. I personally wouldn't be able to watch anymore if that was the case.

And lastly, the buzz topic in F1 recently. Improving the show. I agree with you on the point of "technical spectacle of F1" I was a fan of KERS and I'm sad to see things like the f-duct and the double diffuser are getting banned, it seems innovation itself is getting outlawed. But, for many people, the technical aspect won't put bums on seats in grandstands. For the most part, the casual fans want to see races like we saw most recently in Turkey. That was a perfect case to show how good F1 can really be. But we need more races like that more often for fan numbers to increase. I believe that is perhaps why NASCAR is so popular in the States, cars can follow closely and overtaking is pretty much constant. In my mind, F1 needs to mix exciting innovations with exciting racing, much like sportscar racing does so spectacularly.

Sorry for the long a## post, hope you've managed to survive it!

I don't think your post really addresses the entire problem, but it's a solid start.

Promotion, in my opinion, isn't really what the problem is. They've done promotion here; Jaguar did a demonstration in NYC in 2000. The USGP was very well-attended, so in terms of a race, the interest was there. Television viewership is higher for F1 in the U.S. than IndyCar (excluding the Indianapolis 500). I don't think marketing the sport to NASCAR fans, many of whom do know about F1, is the way to go. NASCAR fans aren't going to become fans of motor racing because the majority of them are there for reasons other than racing. To F1's credit, saying they had no drive is a bit harsh, when they have tried before. Bernie did mandate four races be on national TV; it just so happened those four races had roughly the same viewership as the ones on SPEED so the whole thing is a waste of time. McLaren tried to get Lewis Hamilton on Late Show with David Letterman in 2007 during the USGP weekend, but Letterman declined. It's not like promotion will totally boost it; Hélio Castroneves won Dancing with the Stars, a popularity contest to be honest, and that helped IndyCar's viewership...continue to go downward. People won't watch something because they saw it being promoted somewhere unless it's something that appeals to them. F1 doesn't, and shouldn't have to, appeal to the U.S. general public.

Unfortunately, your second point is true. Average Joe wants to see a U.S. American driver in a Buick-powered U.S. American chassis beating all those communists from Europe. Even better, he wants to see 26 U.S. Americans in U.S. American teams and cars racing all 19 races in U.S. America. And even more so, he wants to see 43 of that in 36 races with full fenders. NASCAR's an all-American sport; that's why it has so many fans who aren't fans of the actual motorsport aspects of it (that and the crashes).

Mainstream TV is not an issue in the least. The United States is very television-happy; most people have high definition, for example, and a few hundred channels. SPEEDTV is available in over 70,000,000 U.S. households and 45,000,000 Canadian ones. A normal SPEEDTV race (normal being European, start time 7:30 AM, 6:30 AM, 5:30 AM, or 4:30 AM depending on where in the United States the viewer is) draws a .3 (roughly 921,000 viewers). The races shown at noon on national TV (meaning everyone with a TV has it) draw...a .4 (1,228,000 viewers). Is there a gain? Sure, but it's not enough to warrant it being on national TV. In the United States, there are two ways on TV: the network either pays you or you have to pay the network to buy the time (such as what IndyCar, Champ Car, ALMS, etc do or have had to do). Formula 1's ratings aren't high enough for any national network to pay to air it; FOM would have to pay money to put it on TV, which they won't do when SPEED will pay them to air it. Now, you could call FOM cheap, but they aren't. Time-buys don't get promoted on the network; all 19 races could be on FOX, but FOX would never show an advertisement for it because it would essentially be an infomercial for them (it would be listed as "Paid Programming" in the TV guide rather than "Formula 1").

An exciting product would no doubt help them sell it here, but Formula 1 needs to be true to F1 and not become something else to appeal to just one nation. F1 needs to be exciting by F1 terms (technologically, strategically, limited overtakes that are spectacular when they do occur, etc), not by NASCAR terms. F1, by nature, is a sport that requires a bit of thought to enjoy, same with ALMS. That's why they're both not doing that well; the U.S. general public want sports with total in your face action that requires no thought to understand. They want it simple and over-the-top. It's a difference in mentality; it's not right or wrong, it's just how it is.

So what did I say in all that? It's a lost cause to make F1 super-duper popular in the U.S., and it doesn't need to be popular. It's popular enough that it's on television without a time-buy, and it's popular enough that the USGP at Indy was extremely well-attended. They can run a race or two here and have high attendance. Will Austin do that? I don't know; we'll see. It does depend on how much people are willing to travel; a lot of people from South America and even Europe traveled to Indy for the race because they wanted to visit a historic track or the United States in general.

It is worth nothing that the top three in GP3 standings are all North Americans, with Esteban Gutiérrez, Alexander Rossi, and Robert Wickens representing all three North American nations. If any of them can make it to F1, it would help (Mexico, for example, borders Texas, so it could help the Austin race to have Gutiérrez or Pérez make F1 if fans are willing to travel to see them) a little I assume.

I did and I think you are right about everything you said here, F1 should be in national TV if they want to get people's attention here you can only get it on Speed and for 3 races in the year F1 will be on ABC I think but it won't be live, FOM should address this ASAP if they want to make this whole US GP stuff work, as they are building a new track for this race they can make it with pently of overtaking places and wide enough so drivers can have more than one racing line without compromising speed and what I really think it would help F1 here is having at least 3 races in a year in USA, this country is almost as big as Europe and one race is not enough for the amount of people living here, you can have the Texas, Indy and NY GPs and who knows if a Florida one can be on cards now that people are talking about 24 races ina year and I heard about some people who wants to have a US team in F1, that could help a lot but only one race IMO will never works.

Actually, four races will be on FOX, including the Grand Prix du Canada, which will indeed be live. The other three are same-day delay. The problem with national TV is that they would have to buy the airtime because their ratings aren't high enough for national TV to actually pay them.

Netwrook TV is not going to help increase viewership, though. Look at IndyCar. Everyone blames VERSUS for the low ratings, yet the NHL Stanley Cup playoff game got a 4.1 rating, while IndyCar on NATIONAL TV on ABC with the Indy 500 got a 3.68 (and a .3 when they are on VERSUS). People have the channels and don't even know...they'll find them when they want to, and the sport has to give the fans a reason to find them. IndyCar, for example, does not.

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Actually, four races will be on FOX, including the Grand Prix du Canada, which will indeed be live. The other three are same-day delay. The problem with national TV is that they would have to buy the airtime because their ratings aren't high enough for national TV to actually pay them.

Netwrook TV is not going to help increase viewership, though. Look at IndyCar. Everyone blames VERSUS for the low ratings, yet the NHL Stanley Cup playoff game got a 4.1 rating, while IndyCar on NATIONAL TV on ABC with the Indy 500 got a 3.68 (and a .3 when they are on VERSUS). People have the channels and don't even know...they'll find them when they want to, and the sport has to give the fans a reason to find them. IndyCar, for example, does not.

Glad to hear that Canada will be live, I am not sure about waht I am going to say but I think the separation between IRL and Cart was the cause of the falling of the sport, now they are together again but the damage is done, Indicar used to be a great series, I found people in my country who told me they don't like F1 but the enjoyed Indycar a lot a that time and I used to follow it almost as much as I follow F1 I enjoy watching Mansell wining the championship and JV and Montoya and many more, the competion was great I never understood the strategy but the action was great you could see a very nice train of more than 10 cars in almost every race and most of the drivers were good, I really hope for a revival of that series specially now that we don't have tests in F1, I rememeber I use to enjoy those weeks when we had a F1 race in one week and the next one an Indycar race so there was no holes for a couple of weeks.

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I don't think your post really addresses the entire problem, but it's a solid start.

Promotion, in my opinion, isn't really what the problem is. They've done promotion here; Jaguar did a demonstration in NYC in 2000. The USGP was very well-attended, so in terms of a race, the interest was there. Television viewership is higher for F1 in the U.S. than IndyCar (excluding the Indianapolis 500). I don't think marketing the sport to NASCAR fans, many of whom do know about F1, is the way to go. NASCAR fans aren't going to become fans of motor racing because the majority of them are there for reasons other than racing. To F1's credit, saying they had no drive is a bit harsh, when they have tried before. Bernie did mandate four races be on national TV; it just so happened those four races had roughly the same viewership as the ones on SPEED so the whole thing is a waste of time. McLaren tried to get Lewis Hamilton on Late Show with David Letterman in 2007 during the USGP weekend, but Letterman declined. It's not like promotion will totally boost it; Hélio Castroneves won Dancing with the Stars, a popularity contest to be honest, and that helped IndyCar's viewership...continue to go downward. People won't watch something because they saw it being promoted somewhere unless it's something that appeals to them. F1 doesn't, and shouldn't have to, appeal to the U.S. general public.

Unfortunately, your second point is true. Average Joe wants to see a U.S. American driver in a Buick-powered U.S. American chassis beating all those communists from Europe. Even better, he wants to see 26 U.S. Americans in U.S. American teams and cars racing all 19 races in U.S. America. And even more so, he wants to see 43 of that in 36 races with full fenders. NASCAR's an all-American sport; that's why it has so many fans who aren't fans of the actual motorsport aspects of it (that and the crashes).

Mainstream TV is not an issue in the least. The United States is very television-happy; most people have high definition, for example, and a few hundred channels. SPEEDTV is available in over 70,000,000 U.S. households and 45,000,000 Canadian ones. A normal SPEEDTV race (normal being European, start time 7:30 AM, 6:30 AM, 5:30 AM, or 4:30 AM depending on where in the United States the viewer is) draws a .3 (roughly 921,000 viewers). The races shown at noon on national TV (meaning everyone with a TV has it) draw...a .4 (1,228,000 viewers). Is there a gain? Sure, but it's not enough to warrant it being on national TV. In the United States, there are two ways on TV: the network either pays you or you have to pay the network to buy the time (such as what IndyCar, Champ Car, ALMS, etc do or have had to do). Formula 1's ratings aren't high enough for any national network to pay to air it; FOM would have to pay money to put it on TV, which they won't do when SPEED will pay them to air it. Now, you could call FOM cheap, but they aren't. Time-buys don't get promoted on the network; all 19 races could be on FOX, but FOX would never show an advertisement for it because it would essentially be an infomercial for them (it would be listed as "Paid Programming" in the TV guide rather than "Formula 1").

An exciting product would no doubt help them sell it here, but Formula 1 needs to be true to F1 and not become something else to appeal to just one nation. F1 needs to be exciting by F1 terms (technologically, strategically, limited overtakes that are spectacular when they do occur, etc), not by NASCAR terms. F1, by nature, is a sport that requires a bit of thought to enjoy, same with ALMS. That's why they're both not doing that well; the U.S. general public want sports with total in your face action that requires no thought to understand. They want it simple and over-the-top. It's a difference in mentality; it's not right or wrong, it's just how it is.

So what did I say in all that? It's a lost cause to make F1 super-duper popular in the U.S., and it doesn't need to be popular. It's popular enough that it's on television without a time-buy, and it's popular enough that the USGP at Indy was extremely well-attended. They can run a race or two here and have high attendance. Will Austin do that? I don't know; we'll see. It does depend on how much people are willing to travel; a lot of people from South America and even Europe traveled to Indy for the race because they wanted to visit a historic track or the United States in general.

It is worth nothing that the top three in GP3 standings are all North Americans, with Esteban Gutiérrez, Alexander Rossi, and Robert Wickens representing all three North American nations. If any of them can make it to F1, it would help (Mexico, for example, borders Texas, so it could help the Austin race to have Gutiérrez or Pérez make F1 if fans are willing to travel to see them) a little I assume.

Now I don't understand the problem, if like you said and I saw, the USGP had a pretty good attendance why are we saying that it didn't work? :eusa_think:

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Glad to hear that Canada will be live, I am not sure about waht I am going to say but I think the separation between IRL and Cart was the cause of the falling of the sport, now they are together again but the damage is done, Indicar used to be a great series, I found people in my country who told me they don't like F1 but the enjoyed Indycar a lot a that time and I used to follow it almost as much as I follow F1 I enjoy watching Mansell wining the championship and JV and Montoya and many more, the competion was great I never understood the strategy but the action was great you could see a very nice train of more than 10 cars in almost every race and most of the drivers were good, I really hope for a revival of that series specially now that we don't have tests in F1, I rememeber I use to enjoy those weeks when we had a F1 race in one week and the next one an Indycar race so there was no holes for a couple of weeks.

The split was huge in killing it off, yes. CART mismanaged themselves, though, which ultimately killed it. Had CART been run properly and not by a bunch of corrupt clowns, it would have easily destroyed IRL much as it killed off USAC and the split would have ended after only a few years. Sadly, CART messed up, and everything ended up in the sad state it is now.

CART was a fantastic series, though, and Randy Bernard is doing his best to restore the sport over the next few years with sweeping rules changes. I believe he'll create a better situation for IndyCar in the near future, and if open-wheel racing of that variety can become more popular in the United States, it may help Formula 1 a little bit. I know that NASCAR fans, for example, having been exposed to NASCAR are very willing to try the touring car series that SPEED shows such as V8 Supercars as they were promoted as "Australia's version of NASCAR," and having an ex-V8 racer Marcos Ambrose in the sport did help. If IndyCar could succeed, some people might want even more racing, and look to F1 for some more, especially if both are using the Global Racing Engine which would link the sports a bit more closely.

Now I don't understand the problem, if like you said and I saw, the USGP had a pretty good attendance why are we saying that it didn't work? :eusa_think:

It didn't work because the government wasn't going to fund the race (and I applaud them for not doing that; an auto race should not be part of a government's spending) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway could not fund it solo. IMS was and still is in financial hell; the Indianapolis 500 and Brickyard 400 are both losing attendance year after year, and Tony George p**sed away tens and tens and tens of millions on creating the Indy Racing League. His sisters on the board of directors at that point were telling him to stop spending so much of their family fortune (they'd been telling him since 1997, actually), so George agreed he wouldn't pay more than $15,000,000 for the USGP, but Bernie wanted more, and that's why the whole thing ended. George would later be ousted from IMS and IndyCar, of course, by those sisters and replaced by the much more sensible Randy Bernard.

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When I went to Monza, there was 3: GP2, Formula BMW & Porsche Supercup! Other events might have different support races!

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It didn't work because the government wasn't going to fund the race (and I applaud them for not doing that; an auto race should not be part of a government's spending) and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway could not fund it solo. IMS was and still is in financial hell; the Indianapolis 500 and Brickyard 400 are both losing attendance year after year, and Tony George p**sed away tens and tens and tens of millions on creating the Indy Racing League. His sisters on the board of directors at that point were telling him to stop spending so much of their family fortune (they'd been telling him since 1997, actually), so George agreed he wouldn't pay more than $15,000,000 for the USGP, but Bernie wanted more, and that's why the whole thing ended. George would later be ousted from IMS and IndyCar, of course, by those sisters and replaced by the much more sensible Randy Bernard.

I agree on the whole that it shouldn't be Government, but I just laugh at the hypocrisy of our Government to chuck bucket loads of money at a one off event like the Olympics and willing to do the same for another one off event like the World Cup when today, the Government has said the deficit is even bigger than originally feared.

Not even a half of that bucket load of money that they are chucking at the Olympics could make the British GP survive quite happily for some 10 years and help protect the motorsport infastructure in Britain in an area where Britian is so successful of late. It seems most sports from pogo to the hopscotch have benefitted somewhat from the Government, yet not motorsport.

Hang on. I feel another rant coming on. I need to go and have a lie down.

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