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Indy 500 ... irrelevant?

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by spnited, May 12, 2007.

  1. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    Like I said, we just had the Derby and the Indy 500.

    Walk into Borders and see how many magazine covers the winners will be on next week, or how many papers will have the winners on the front of the sports section above the fold.

    Then look at how many poker magazines, UFC magazines, X games magazines and hell even gaming magazines there are instead of horse racing and IRL magazines.

    I'm not saying that it is right, but those two sports are on the way out.
     
  2. shotglass

    shotglass Guest

    Bingo.

    I don't even want to hear about ultimate fighting. It's a teensy tiny little slice of the landscape, and it makes some people feel like they're cutting-edge when they pump it up. There's nothing there TO pump up, and it's not overtaking boxing.
     
  3. CollegeJournalist

    CollegeJournalist Active Member

    SI has run the Derby on their cover for as long as I remember. I don't know if it did this year since I don't get SI anymore, but they have the last several years.

    And one of the biggest stories in sports this past year was Barbaro, a freaking horse.

    Maybe I don't see it as on the way out because I'm in KY and horse racing is still a year-round thing here, but I've always viewed horse racing as somewhat of a niche sport anyway. It's always going to be huge here and in some other areas, and it's sort of popular in other places.

    As a born and bred Kentuckian, horse racing is still one of my favorite sports. Way ahead of car racing.
     
  4. crimsonace

    crimsonace Well-Known Member

    I don't know if Indy racing or hockey ever were major-tier sports for long periods of time.

    The lack of interest in IndyCar racing today is often blamed on 1996 ... while that was certainly bad timing, it is nothing new.

    The Indy 500 was "big" in a time period when there were few "big" sporting events -- and it was really the only major auto race. It was also "big" in a time when TV coverage of sports was minimal, so major events got more of our attention -- the Triple Crown, the four majors in golf & tennis (another sport that has seen a decline since the growth of cable/satellite TV), the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500. Now, one can watch virtually every MLB, NFL, NHL and NBA game played, has 80 NASCAR races a year beamed into his living room and can watch hundreds of college football & basketball games a year.

    So, sports fans tend to specialize. If you're not in an area where racing is a cultural thing (e.g. Indianapolis for open-wheelers, or the South for stock-car fans), the Indy 500 is likely to fall off your radar screen; just like Wimbledon & the French Open might fall off your radar screen if you're not a tennis nut.

    Addressing Indy specifically, the decline in crowds on qualifying days really began with four things:
    1. The new engine formulas keeping speeds in the 220-228 range, therefore making sure track records aren't going to be set (the allure of seeing a guy break massive speed records was gone).
    2. ESPN/ABC's wall-to-wall coverage of qualifying ... at IMS, one can sit in the stands, watch a single car go by every 40 seconds, and then pick hairs out of your nose (or guzzle another Bud) until that single car comes by again. It's virtually impossible to tell the difference between the 225.9 that Helio Castroneves is doing from the 222.1 that Michael Andretti is doing -- a difference of about one second over 2.5 miles. Or, you can watch at home on TV, see corner-by-corner trap speeds, telemetry, reaction/strategy from drivers & crew chiefs and know exactly where everyone is in the field at all times.
    3. Cleaning up the Snake Pit and the infield, which sent the party crowd home.
    4. ABC/ESPN only really began televising Indy qualifying about 20 years ago. But even then, the crowds weren't quite what they used to be -- in the 1960s, 100,000 people would be in the house for Pole Day. But in the 1960s, you'd see some exotic machines -- between the mid-1950s (when dirt cars were still the norm) and 1972 (when wings began being used en masse), there was a tremendous amount of innovation every year. There was the switch to the low-slung roadsters, then to the rear-engined European cars, to the Andy Granatelli turbines, to the gigantic rear wings creating downforce.

    Not only that, but the Indy 500 wasn't on TV live *anywhere* until 1986, and wasn't shown on the same day in Indianapolis until the mid-1990s. So, for locals, if you wanted to see the cars and be a part of the Indy 500, you had to go to qualifying.

    Now, to address the other issue, which is "what happened to IndyCar racing?"

    Until the NASCAR explosion of the last 15 or so years, auto racing has always been much like hockey, something of a niche sport with a broader following for big events. In open-wheel racing, the focus was *always* on Indy. The AAA/USAC schedule pretty much consisted of Indy and a few smaller events scattered throughout the country -- maybe a couple of races at Milwaukee, a dirt race or two at DuQuoin and Springfield and Langhorne, and later on, a 500-miler in California and road races at different places (Sanair, Riverside, et al). But the focus really never was on the series, it was on the 500 (and only the 500).

    When CART was created in 1979, it was mostly successful in doing two things -- wresting control of Indy from USAC and creating emphasis on the full season, rather than just one race.

    Television helped promote CART in those early days. Armed with the "stars of Indy" -- Andretti, Foyt, Unser, Johncock, Rutherford -- some new guys like Rick Mears & Bobby Rahal coming up and combining with some successful second-generation drivers (Michael Andretti, Al Unser Jr.), it was set for a perfect storm. It brought the stars of Indy to the nation, and attendance increased everywhere.

    What "killed" IndyCar were several things that happened at the same time:
    1. Virtually all of those "stars" retired within 5 years of each other, save Andretti & Unser Jr., who went to the CART series. Remember that few people paid attention to IndyCar racing outside of Indy anyway. They all retired by 1994 -- one full year before the split.
    2. NASCAR exploding and putting an emphasis on the entire season -- the Winston/Nextel Cup has always been played as more important than Daytona or any single race, so it's a drama that builds through the year. Meanwhile, most IndyCar followers (myself included) can name the last 30 Indy 500 winners but would struggle to name more than a handful of series champions from those years.
    3. The split, which accelerated an already-happening decline. But, for all intents and purposes, the split is over. Save for Newman-Haas, there isn't a single team in Champ Car that would compete for race wins in the IRL. However, since 2001, everybody in open-wheel (save N-H) that would be competitive at Indy is at Indy. However, IndyCar racing outside of Indy has always played to a niche audience -- minus six or seven years in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
     
  5. crimsonace

    crimsonace Well-Known Member

    Playing to that angle, you might say the NBA is on the way out, because you'll find more gaming magazines than NBA magazines.

    Magazines play to a niche crowd. And sports magazines in general have largely been replaced by the internet due to the quickness by which information becomes outdated.

    I may like hockey, but I don't subscribe to The Hockey News. I read multiple newspapers on the Internet and I watch games on TV. I'm a rabid Cubs fan, but I don't subscribe to VineLine or any baseball magazines. I get enough information from the Chicago papers.
     
  6. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    I thought crimsonace would come in with a good take on this at some point. Long, but good.

    Also liked Robin Miller's take at speedtv.com. I think the train has long left the station on getting different cars/engines/technology at Indy, for the most part, but his idea of a huge purse with $10 million to win is outstanding. Relevance = money. End of story.

    http://www.speedtv.com/commentary/37327/
     
  7. Clerk Typist

    Clerk Typist Guest

    Crimsonace nailed it almost totally, including that the rest of the series (any open wheel series) has always been secondary to Indianapolis, which in some respects shows just how huge the race is. You get 275,000 for Indy, including the infield crowd, and 25,000 at Milwaukee or Langhorne or Cleveland, and that's true whether it's the 60s or the 00s. Only a few places (Ontario the first couple of years, Michigan until the tire went into the crowd and killed three people, which may be more coincidental than causal) have ever drawn huge numbers, which was also true in NASCAR until the mid-late 80s. A couple of other things:
    1. Qualifying crowds were/are local and regional, coming from Indy and the area, maybe as far as Chicago. The race crowd comes from around the country, really around the world.
    This year's 500 program has a shot of the crowd from Pole Day 1977, when Tom Sneva topped 200 mph for the first time. Jammed in every grandstand. As crimsonace said, no track record prospect keeps people away. But there were 30,000-40,000 there Saturday, the best Pole Day in several years when there's been good weather.
    2. With only one race, May was the only time to go to the track and watch or party. Adding the Brickyard in 1994 (which helped finance the IRL and the F1 rebuild) and then the USGP in 2000 meant two, now three races across the calendar.
    Now you go from 257,000 seats (thanks to Curt Cavin of the Indy Star for counting them) sold for one race to 514,000 for two and about 700,000 for three; Turn 3 and half the north chute stand isn't for sale for the GP. That's a lot of seats at $70 and up ($40 for inside turn 1 and the south chute, of which there are just a few thousand).
    At least a few people are skipping qualifying and going to two or three races, which fills the Speedway's coffers.
    About TV and Indy: For qualifying, pre-cable nationally, there was only what ABC showed on Wide World of Sports on Pole Day (as far back as 1961), and a few minutes the second and third day, plus, some years, a special on the final hour of qualifying. Local Indy TV did a little more. I think the move to live TV of the race in 1986 boosted it. If it wasn't on TV until the evening, it would probably get creamed in the ratings in the continuous news cycle era.
    Oh, and actually USAC was always the 500's sanctioning body until the IRL came along. CART usually awarded points for the 500 on its calendar but never ran the race.
    Finally, most thinking people don't miss the Snakepit, whether it was in Turn 1 (60s-70s) or Turn 4 (80s-90s). George tried and succeeded in the Disneyfication of the track. Even the concession workers have teeth now.
     
  8. markvid

    markvid Guest

    By the way, is the race still blacked out in Indy?
     
  9. IU90

    IU90 Member

    Crimsonace, I thought that was an excellent analysis. One point, however, that I might quibble with is your argument that the attendance decline is explained in part by more people electing to watch the more detailed coverage on television. If that was the case, then TV ratings for the events would presumably have a corresponding increase (or at least wouldn't decline). But my understanding is the opposite, TV ratings were ALSO much higher back in the days when 100,000 plus would attend qualifications.

    The factor that I think gets underplayed in importance was Tony George's miscalculated attempt to Disneyfy the track and make it a more "family friendly" environment by cleaning up the infield, getting rid of the snakepit, and cracking down on the public drunkenness. The ensuing years have demonstrated just how many people were going to quals for the party (answer: a HELLUVA lot) as they've gradually stopped coming.
     
  10. playthrough

    playthrough Moderator Staff Member

    I can't believe the lack of snakepit is being cited this much in the attendance decline. When you look at pole day pictures like 1977 as clerk typist noted, the stands were packed. These were the racing fans. These are the ones who aren't coming today for any number of reasons (I say the lack of speed intrigue is No. 1, today it's identical cars and engines that aren't pushing the envelope anymore), and they are missed so much more than infield revelers.

    I hate myself for saying it and sounding old fuddy-duddy, but Tony George can't possibly be criticized for creating a fan-friendly environment. Cracking down on public drunkenness is a bad thing?
     
  11. IU90

    IU90 Member

    Well, it is to west-side bar, restaurant and strip club owners who've seen their May dream-weekends drying up in recent years (surprised one of those guys hasn't taken a contract out on George by now). No doubt the number of true race fans in attendance has also sharply declined, but there are also untold thousands that used to come for the party that have stopped making the trip after George's efforts to end the debauchery. I'm certainly not saying its the only or main reason, only that its one factor that I think gets underplayed (and often unmentioned entirely) in most explanations I've seen for the declining attendance.
     
  12. Bob Cook

    Bob Cook Active Member

    You've just been assigned to spend May at Wild Cheri for an in-depth investigation about the changing demographics and volume of the Indy crowd. Make sure to get your shots first.
     
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