With summer entering its final two weeks and having just returned from Road America, time in the year 2008 is quickly winding down. Lost in the shuffle of the RA weekend, which brought the crowds on Saturday, was an overlooked result of the open-wheel unification.
RA was one of the tracks that, although they lost their Champ Car race, was able to continue with its scheduled events for this season. As such, a plethora of feeder and sedan series stepped up to the plate on Sunday. The problem was, outside of the respective series officials, the media center was even deader than it was last year.
And the fan turnout was substantially less - in part due to ticket prices that were far more than they should have been due to what happened. $50 a pop for seven feeder series events is about double what the price of admission should have been.
A word also about the new television contract for the IRL IndyCar Series from 2009 forward. Versus, a.k.a. a channel no-one has ever heard of, gets the rights for 13 of 18 events for the next ten years. Contrary to many of the series' media, I am not only frustrated with the deal but fail to see how it can be beneficial to the series' growth in the long run. Moving a series from a network that is available in 20 million more homes (at the minimum), plus the avenues of SportsCenter, ESPN.com, and the Bottom Line, fails to catch my eye.
What incentive do sponsors have to commit to a series where so few races are available on network TV? CART/Champ Car tried this and failed - twice - though in both cases they were in a slightly worse situation by not only moving to a network that had less exposure (SPEED and then Spike TV, 2002 and '04) but paying for their airtime to do so. I'm all for better coverage and more exposure, but not on a network that a majority of the race fans don't get.
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