Long-awaited post #2

All right, so I've been busy and tired this whole year and I haven't been able to blog since February, but something happened this past week that completely woke me up (and it doesn't involve the Supreme Court). Last Saturday's Indy Car race, the MavTV 500 from Fontana, CA, was the best race I've seen in pretty much any series in the last decade. It was reminiscent of the Hanford wing races of the late 90s-early 2000s CART series, and of the early-mid 2000s Indy Racing League racing, coupled with action similar to a NASCAR restrictor-plate race. The reason it necessitates a blog post, however, is not because it was so good. Anyone with two eyes, two ears, a brain, and a heart could have seen it without me telling you. The problem is that no one did see it. The overnight ratings for the live NBCSN telecast were a whopping 0.37. By comparison, this year's Daytona 500 pulled in a 7.3 (and that's even much lower than it should be). The crowd in Fontana was abysmal too, with an estimated attendance of under 20,000. Although the track doesn't give an official number, anyone with the same eyes who watched the amazing race could see that some Texas high school football games get bigger crowds.

This leads to the next problem, even if the few fans who saw the race were happy, the drivers (at least several of the big names) were livid, and down right scared of the racing. The only drivers interviewed on camera who didn't complain were the winner, Graham Rahal, and third place finisher, Marco Andretti, along with Ryan Hunter Reay, Ryan Briscoe, Ed Carpenter, and Josef Newgarden, the latter four of which were, oddly enough, all taken out in crashes. The biggest complainer, not surprisingly, was Will Power, who even went so far as to invoke memories of the 2011 Las Vegas Indy Car race, in which Dan Wheldon was killed. Tony Kanaan was the second-most vocal, and Juan Pablo Montoya expressed a milder displeasure. Marco Andretti said it best, "Yeah, it was crazy, but that's what they pay us to do. I just hope we put on a good show for the fans." What the others failed to realize is how safe the current car is compared to the ones raced in 2011. Dan Wheldon himself did much of the testing of the current car before his passing, albeit without the 2015 aero packages. What they also failed to mention was that Fontana is a wide, sweeping, 2-mile track, completely unlike the 2011 situation at Vegas: a 1.5 mile progressive-banked track, where Indy Car stupidly started 34 cars, and one-third of the drivers had little-to-no oval experience.

Indy Car has been on life support ever since the late 1990s, and it's a crying shame, because they have the best on-track product from week-to-week. If the tickets were a little cheaper, and the drivers a little more famous, and the promoters a little bit better, it might survive. But for now, it will live in the shadows of its stock car counterparts, who aren't doing that great either compared to where they once were. But that's a story for next week: NASCAR's Coke Zero 400 at Daytona.