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amazing race... best race for 2013 easily.

Marco finally putting together some consistent results and a strong start to a season, could this be Marco's year to finally put in a championship contention season?

That is how Indycar races should be. Man this series is good.

What a great race/win. I'm going to have to download this race.

Just tremendous car racing. That's all we ask for.

I know your feelings. After watching a lot of the American Broadcasts, I just can't stand the Brazillian comentators. When a brazillian is leading all they can say is this fact over and over. And all the "expert" comments by the "expert" drivers are just info we're all tired of hearing.

I resisted the temptation of seeing this live as I had great plans for the sunday going into a golf course for the first time in my life, and I always wanted to (at least re)watch the race tru the american broadcast just to see their point of view (a less parcial one). So I downloaded tru those torrents sites.

And eventhough I saw the picture of the winner and I knew it was on the last moments that he got the win, I was glad I did this. Just can't stand 5min of the Brazillian broadcast sometimes.


As for the race. Epic epic epic. I love this track layout. I'm really proud that Brazil host this race. Just 4 years and already so much happened. This soon will be a classic.


Oh, and in Brazil. Grand Prix, as for racing goes. It's only said for F1 until I can remember. But the TV station that broadcast Formula Indy (that's how it's called here for a long time), it's doing everything to steal audience from F1 as some people there keep saying that "Formula Indy is so much better than F1". As the 2 categories have anything alike.......

We were basically forced to listen the brazilian commentaries as this was the only option left coming from the local speakers. And we suffered as much as the guys who watched on tv.

I wonder why Teo José is not hosting the races. Téo basically is the "IndyCar guy" in Brazil (specially in the 90's when he commented CART races in SBT channel). Today he works only as football commentator in the same tv station where IndyCar is broadcasted in Brazil, what a sin.

Luciano do Valle and Felipe Giaffone working as the IndyCar hosts.

Luciano do Vale is the boss of the comentators, and he thinks he owns the right to comment theese kind of races. Huge ego there.


I heard about this of a collegue of work. Edgard de Mello Filho and his podcast "Loucos por Automobilismo", do you know?

http://www.autoracing.com.br/loucos-com ... l-de-2013/


Also don't miss Lito Cavalcanti's column http://www.autoracing.com.br/corrida/lito-cavalcanti/

Edgar Mello Filho is good but only with minor racing series like Porsche, Marcas and others....honestly I think he's a bit annoying.

What about Eduardo Homem de Mello? The guy is funny as hell....he already worked as IndyCar commentator in BandSports, don't know If he's still there as the last IndyCar races I watched in BandSports, Tarso Marques was working as the second commentator.

Lito Cavalcanti is a genius in Sportv, one of the best commentators in the continent....but his interest is directed entirely to the Formula 1 universe.

So the best Indycar race in ages that gave us a huge amount of renewed hope for the series....got a 0.2 rating with 220,000 viewers.

That's like Skysports F1 level of viewership. On a channel that has BBC F1 reach.

Any more drops and it'll be Motors TV level.

So, the racing is great but no-one is watching, how long can it go on like this?

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RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley

bad promotion?

I think the problems are probably more deep rooted in the publics psyche. After the shenanigans of the 90's and the 00's, Open Wheel racing has lost generations of fans. Almost regardless of the promotion, they won't watch it. It's like I can see an advert for the new Star Trek movie, but since I have no interested in the franchise, regardless of how impressive the film actually is, it holds no interest to me.

Once you've lost the public, it can be a long time getting them back.

??????

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NBCSN has about the same reach over there as ESPN UK does over here.

Anyway, Randy set it up so that people could follow the series for a while on ABC after the Indy 500, so there should be some better figures coming up.

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Dan Wheldon ¦ 1978-2011
Marco Simoncelli ¦ 1987-2011
Jules Bianchi ¦ 1989-2015
Justin Wilson ¦ 1978-2015

Yeah, I know he's mad and I don't care. I do not care. I did not care then. I do not care now. I'm here to race him.

No one cares about IndyCar racing. It's easy to blame the split, but people just don't care outside of Indy because the series doesn't have enough gravitas. There's nothing really to bring in new fans from my generation. The cars have little power, there are no records being set, there's no revolutionary technology. Most of IndyCar is "seen it before". It's just not compelling enough for Americans because Americans don't really care about "good racing".

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That's probably the sad truth

Another thing is the collapse of the ladder system. Every single hot shot shot from midgets and sprint cars goes to NASCAR these days. There's absolutely no following into the open-wheel while NASCAR can hook up on Kyle Larson and others. I mean the Trucks ain't the old-timers graveyard anymore. Take Bodine and Hornaday away and I think there's no FT over 35 yo anymore. All the talent goes to NASCAR because they don't have elsewhere to go apart from European GP3 and GP2 which requires a certain budget already. And of course it helps that the biggest race in NASCAR is much easier to win than IndyCar's biggest race. Plus IndyCar fans got tired with Danica's personality and neither Marco, Rahal or RHR can attract any of that attention. They've got the names to link to old glory days but just can't strike it big yet. I mean Dario's dominance was anything but profiteable for the series since he was always going to be Ashley's husband more than anything else. Imagine Dale Jr hooking up with some Hollywood actress, that would be twice as big and I bet nobody would forget what his name was.

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07.04.1968 - Flower of Scotland when will we see your like again?
01.05.1994 - We'll never forget...

Indy Lights with 10 entries at Long Beach and 3 of them wrecked each other on a straightaway before T1. Certainly helping a lot.

One of the main stumbling block for the series is that it is always going to be seen as too 'foreign' by mainstream Americans. The cars and tracks are still a mostly non-American concept, and most of the drivers are foreign and not particularly big international names either, more well known for being F1 rejects than anything else. Just throwing in a few oval races apart from the 500 isn't really going to fix that either but can't hurt.

Sure, CART was 'like that' too but it carried on rolling the ball that was initiated during the USAC glory days, retaining all of the great home grown names like Andretti, Foyt, Rutherford, etc., but it was fast becoming more and more foreign as the 80s rolled on, in terms of drivers and tracks. The traditional ladder system of midgets and sprints was gone and now you had to either go to Europe or run Atlantics or something to get in. So you suddenly appeared in the top series after spending years in ladder series that most Americans don't follow, whereas in NASCAR, you can follow an up and comer's progress nicely from K&N to trucks and Nationwide all the way to Cup. Look how the 'legend' of Kyle Larson is already forming so well even before he gets to Cup, for example.

Even if the split had not happened, it was only a matter of time, I believe, before the series would have fallen behind NASCAR in terms of American appeal anyway but would have thrived abroad quite well, perhaps even challenging F1 but of course, the split reduced its appeal to both American and global fans at the same time and started its overall downfall.

Thankyou Tony George. Thankyou very much.

The split politics definitely was the big drive for the poor ratings in the 2000s in my opinion.

Nowadays, Indycar not only has to fight the past but also the current climate on racing. NASCAR is still popular, of course, but in the last few years, it too has actually declined quite a bit both in attendance and in TV ratings. The automobile is less a thing to the next generation, I think, than ones before it... and in the current economy, big trips (like you usually have to take to race tracks) have become expensive. The fact that all forms of motorsport have become less latest-and-greatest-tech and have become a bit of a spec series (to some degree or another) probably hasn't helped either. I just imagine that it's not that exciting *overall* to a lot more people these days.

The "foreign drivers" issue really was more an issue of fixing the ladder system in America, and that certainly was a 1990s problem. Promising midget/sprint drivers like say Jeff Gordon should've been able to find an Indy ride and not settle for NASCAR. The 25/8 Indy rule was probably the worst possible way one could fix that sort of thing, of course.