(by John Oreovicz espn.go.com 11-26-09)
There's a tendency in life to focus on what's wrong with things, and racing is no exception.
But in the spirit of the holiday season, here's a look at what's right. In other words, a few things to be thankful for in the world of open-wheel racing.
Everyone involved with the IndyCar Series is thankful that Izod has come on board as a title sponsor that will aggressively market the series.
Izod and IndyCar officials are thankful that Danica Patrick will concentrate primarily on open-wheelers for the next few years. But they wish she and her handlers would finally get around to announcing it.
A lot of people who spend time at IndyCar races are thankful for the quieter exhaust system Honda Performance Development created for the Honda Indy V-8 -- not to mention Honda's continued support of American open-wheel racing.
All the IndyCar Series drivers appreciate the consistent excellence of the Firestone tires they race on, and are also thankful for the introduction this year of red-sidewall alternate tires for road and street courses.
Speaking of road racing, the vast majority of the IndyCar field is thankful that additional road races (Brazil, Barber) are popping up on the schedule.
But I'm sure I wouldn't be the only thankful person if somebody figured out a way to solve the Milwaukee Mile's financial problems so Indy racing's century of history at the historic venue could be extended.
I don't think I am alone in wanting to see Cleveland and Road America on the IndyCar slate as well.
I'm glad that Indy car racing still attracts world-class drivers like Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Ryan Briscoe and Helio Castroneves.
I'm thankful that Juan Pablo Montoya is starting to show NASCAR and the world that former Indy car drivers really can adapt to stock car racing.
Franchitti and almost every other IndyCar Series competitor are thankful that the ever-slow and always-erratic Milka Duno didn't ever sweep them into a crash.
Another world-class Indy driver, Will Power, is thankful that Roger Penske is stepping up to run a third car for him in 2010.
I'm thankful that the broken back Power suffered (and the broken leg sustained by Nelson Philippe in the same practice crash at Infineon Raceway) was the worst injury of the IndyCar season.
I'm also thankful that I got to witness Justin Wilson's victory for Dale Coyne Racing at Watkins Glen -- one of the best racing stories of the year. A surprisingly long list of drivers out there is grateful to Coyne for his 25 years in the sport.
I'm hopeful that the next wave of American road racing talent -- including JR Hildebrand, Jonathan Summerton, John Edwards, Alexander Rossi and Gabby Chaves -- gets a fair shot at competing in the IndyCar Series, or even F1.
Speaking of F1, world champion Jenson Button is thankful that Red Bull Racing didn't get its car sorted until midseason.
Kimi Raikkonen must be ecstatic at the thought of being paid an eight-figure salary to watch F1 from the sidelines next year.
Felipe Massa is thankful for the safety advances in modern helmets -- as are the Brazilian's legions of fans.
A lot of people remain happy that a few traditional F1 racetracks like Spa, Monza and Suzuka continue to endure the onslaught of fabulous yet characterless Hermann Tilke-designed facilities.
Finally, I'm thankful that my 3-year-old son, Patrick, seems to enjoy watching just about any form of racing as much as his daddy does.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
IndyCar deal with Izod a real shot in the arm
(by John Oreovicz espn.go.com 11-06-09)
"Let's get the party started!"
With those words from Indy Racing League vice president of public relations John Griffin, the IndyCar Series rolled out the red carpet for its first title sponsor since 2001. With the marketing muscle of Phillips-Van Heusen Corp. behind it, the Izod IndyCar Series may finally get noticed as "The Fastest Race in the World."
At first glance, the notion of an apparel brand and a racing series teaming together doesn't add up. But if you look at the initiatives taken (not to mention the promotional dollars spent) since Izod entered Indy car racing as a personal sponsor of American star Ryan Hunter-Reay 16 months ago, it starts to make sense.
"It obviously has been a long time since we've had a title sponsor, and to be honest with you, it's probably the first legitimate title sponsor we've ever had," said IRL competition president Brian Barnhart, without mentioning short-lived former partners Pep Boys (1998-99) and NorthernLight.com (2000-01).
"I think the best thing about it is going to be the activation aspect of it because they're going to spend a lot of money raising the awareness of the series and increasing the amount of eyeballs that are watching our sport. That's the first step in raising the value of participation in this series."
It certainly sounds like the way the six-year deal (with an option for Izod to extend) has been structured will benefit everyone involved with Indy car racing. Aside from the cash influx the Indy Racing League needed at a critical juncture for the company, Izod's money will be allocated to participants as part of the TEAM revenue-sharing program. It's a given that PVH will promote the sport through aggressive television, print and Internet media ad buys and driver appearances at Macy's stores.
Izod is likely to reserve plenty of track signage and work closely with promoters in local race markets.
"We expect to be very aggressive in our spending," said Mike Kelly, PVH executive vice president of marketing and creative.
The title backing, worth upward of $10 million annually, is part of PVH's strategy of building Izod's brand image through sports marketing, including securing naming rights for the Meadowlands arena that the New Jersey Nets call home.
The IndyCar Series also offers PVH the opportunity to cross-market its premium brands, including Calvin Klein, Timberland and Sean John, to the demographically upscale open-wheel audience.
Kelly was Hunter-Reay's guest at the 2008 Indianapolis 500 and said, "It took about four seconds before the needle was in my arm."
By the Watkins Glen race on July 4 weekend, RHR had earned a personal sponsorship contract from Izod. The driver arguably responsible for delivering the Izod title sponsorship to the IndyCar Series affirmed his enthusiasm for the partnership during the presentation at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Pagoda Pavilion on Thursday.
"This is a fresh start for the IndyCar Series," said Hunter-Reay, who is reportedly on the brink of clinching -- with Izod's support -- the open fourth seat with Michael Andretti's team. "This is what we've been waiting for. They're more a marketing company than anything else and the sky's the limit right now."
With the economy in a continued tailspin and Indy car racing's public profile at a low point, Izod couldn't have picked a better time to get on board with open-wheel racing and the chances of the sport making a comeback increased significantly with Thursday's title sponsorship announcement.
"As a corporation, if you see what we're doing across all of our brands, we have not pulled back in our marketing spend even though the environment became difficult," Kelly said. "We have grown, our brands have grown, we've grown in market share -- we believe in share of units, share of dollars, also share of voice and share of mind.
"While our competition has pulled back on their spending, we see it in the marketplace. We've been aggressive with the spend. We're fortunate to be able to do so as a healthy company. It's bearing fruit for us."
Kelly said he and PVH were captivated by the potential of using the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Centennial Celebration as a marketing platform and believe Indy car racing can regain the stature it enjoyed in the 1980s and '90s until the battle for control of the sport between the IRL and CART/Champ Car killed whatever momentum the formula carried.
"The assets are so rich," Kelly said. "If you think about the power of [Indy car racing] during the '80s and the '90s on the American racing landscape, now you've got a next generation that just doesn't realize how sexy and cool this sport is. I think we have a lot to offer the league, but the league has a lot of great assets to tell a story with.
"It's an opportunity, no question," he added. "If everything was rosy and the series was mature after the unification, I'm not sure we could afford it. I think it's right time, right place, and we do see upside. If you think of it as a toddler that's on its feet now, that's the kind of position we like. We want to be part of it, because we're not just committed for the short term."
"Let's get the party started!"
With those words from Indy Racing League vice president of public relations John Griffin, the IndyCar Series rolled out the red carpet for its first title sponsor since 2001. With the marketing muscle of Phillips-Van Heusen Corp. behind it, the Izod IndyCar Series may finally get noticed as "The Fastest Race in the World."
At first glance, the notion of an apparel brand and a racing series teaming together doesn't add up. But if you look at the initiatives taken (not to mention the promotional dollars spent) since Izod entered Indy car racing as a personal sponsor of American star Ryan Hunter-Reay 16 months ago, it starts to make sense.
"It obviously has been a long time since we've had a title sponsor, and to be honest with you, it's probably the first legitimate title sponsor we've ever had," said IRL competition president Brian Barnhart, without mentioning short-lived former partners Pep Boys (1998-99) and NorthernLight.com (2000-01).
"I think the best thing about it is going to be the activation aspect of it because they're going to spend a lot of money raising the awareness of the series and increasing the amount of eyeballs that are watching our sport. That's the first step in raising the value of participation in this series."
It certainly sounds like the way the six-year deal (with an option for Izod to extend) has been structured will benefit everyone involved with Indy car racing. Aside from the cash influx the Indy Racing League needed at a critical juncture for the company, Izod's money will be allocated to participants as part of the TEAM revenue-sharing program. It's a given that PVH will promote the sport through aggressive television, print and Internet media ad buys and driver appearances at Macy's stores.
Izod is likely to reserve plenty of track signage and work closely with promoters in local race markets.
"We expect to be very aggressive in our spending," said Mike Kelly, PVH executive vice president of marketing and creative.
The title backing, worth upward of $10 million annually, is part of PVH's strategy of building Izod's brand image through sports marketing, including securing naming rights for the Meadowlands arena that the New Jersey Nets call home.
The IndyCar Series also offers PVH the opportunity to cross-market its premium brands, including Calvin Klein, Timberland and Sean John, to the demographically upscale open-wheel audience.
Kelly was Hunter-Reay's guest at the 2008 Indianapolis 500 and said, "It took about four seconds before the needle was in my arm."
By the Watkins Glen race on July 4 weekend, RHR had earned a personal sponsorship contract from Izod. The driver arguably responsible for delivering the Izod title sponsorship to the IndyCar Series affirmed his enthusiasm for the partnership during the presentation at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Pagoda Pavilion on Thursday.
"This is a fresh start for the IndyCar Series," said Hunter-Reay, who is reportedly on the brink of clinching -- with Izod's support -- the open fourth seat with Michael Andretti's team. "This is what we've been waiting for. They're more a marketing company than anything else and the sky's the limit right now."
With the economy in a continued tailspin and Indy car racing's public profile at a low point, Izod couldn't have picked a better time to get on board with open-wheel racing and the chances of the sport making a comeback increased significantly with Thursday's title sponsorship announcement.
"As a corporation, if you see what we're doing across all of our brands, we have not pulled back in our marketing spend even though the environment became difficult," Kelly said. "We have grown, our brands have grown, we've grown in market share -- we believe in share of units, share of dollars, also share of voice and share of mind.
"While our competition has pulled back on their spending, we see it in the marketplace. We've been aggressive with the spend. We're fortunate to be able to do so as a healthy company. It's bearing fruit for us."
Kelly said he and PVH were captivated by the potential of using the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Centennial Celebration as a marketing platform and believe Indy car racing can regain the stature it enjoyed in the 1980s and '90s until the battle for control of the sport between the IRL and CART/Champ Car killed whatever momentum the formula carried.
"The assets are so rich," Kelly said. "If you think about the power of [Indy car racing] during the '80s and the '90s on the American racing landscape, now you've got a next generation that just doesn't realize how sexy and cool this sport is. I think we have a lot to offer the league, but the league has a lot of great assets to tell a story with.
"It's an opportunity, no question," he added. "If everything was rosy and the series was mature after the unification, I'm not sure we could afford it. I think it's right time, right place, and we do see upside. If you think of it as a toddler that's on its feet now, that's the kind of position we like. We want to be part of it, because we're not just committed for the short term."
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Is NASCAR playing it too safe?
(by Ed Hinton espn.go.com 10-22-09)
I shall now ask you the fans the toughest, touchiest, most personal, most politically incorrect question I have ever asked you:
Is racing dangerous enough for you anymore?
This bears asking, in light of your massively expressed discontent and growing apathy toward NASCAR. I wonder if the radical reduction of danger in the safety revolution isn't at the root of it all.
Don't get me wrong. I never have been one of those who believed the masses came to motor races to see people get killed.
But I have always believed you came, in some measure, to sense that death and serious injury were being narrowly avoided before your eyes.
I could hear it in your thunderous cheers whenever a Dale Earnhardt or a Tim Richmond would climb out of a demolished car and wave to the crowd. Or a Rick Mears would rise laughing out of a pile of rubble at Indy.
Before Jimmie Johnson rocketed from obscurity at the lesser levels to astounding success in Cup, his entire career highlight film lasted less than a minute: one horrific crash at Watkins Glen, head-on into a barrier that exploded; he jumped right out of the wreckage and onto the roof of his Busch car, and thrust both arms skyward.
Both he and the crowd were clearly exhilarated by his triumph over near-disaster. I wonder if your current apathy toward him is, in part, because he's had no moments like that in Cup.
I'm not pushing you onto a psychiatric couch here. I'm just asking about human nature, the anthropological fact of fascination with, say, the high-wire artist, the matador, the Navy SEAL, or -- in the analogy once drawn for me by NASCAR president Mike Helton -- the fighter pilot.
Atop that list of the daring, for more than a century between the first automobile race in 1894 and this, the fruition of the racing safety revolution, was the racing driver.
These past few years you have told me in droves that NASCAR has become boring -- "BO-ring," you often spell it -- via e-mail and comments on the ESPN Conversation pages. Yet NASCAR publicists bombard me constantly with computer-acquired "loop data" meant to prove, mathematically, that there's more passing, closer racing, fewer runaway wins than ever before.
So all I can rely on are my own eyes and memory, and I cannot for the life of me see that the racing is any more or less boring than it ever was whenever fields get strung out, and someone leads and leads and leads. Johnson does it, but so did Richard Petty.
You roundly say you despise the Car of Tomorrow because it's awkward and further dampens the racing, and because it is essentially a kit car neutered of make.
The new car is aesthetically ugly beyond question, and drivers tell us it's a handful and a clunker. Beyond that, I can't see how it has necessarily hurt the racing -- unless we're constantly watching the driver, inside the car, fighting the wheel and the brake pedal.
As for brand identification, they all looked the same to me a decade before the COT came along. It started in 1997 when NASCAR let Ford get away with a racing Taurus that looked nothing like a street Taurus, and the aerodynamics war went out of control from there, until they were all prototypes, none recognizable from the showroom namesakes.
I wonder whether the real issue with the new car, conscious or subconscious, is that its purpose has been too thoroughly fulfilled -- that it is too safe.
You say the drivers, including Johnson, are mostly vanilla. I wonder if it's more that you don't detect that distinct aura of swagger in men who knew and accepted, whenever a starting grid rolled off the pit road, that they might not make it back.
For the record, no journalist was more vocal than I on behalf of the HANS, soft walls, safer seats, moving the driver more toward the center of the car, and energy-dissipating materials in the cars.
It had gotten to the point that the price of the occasional reminders of the danger was too dear. I'd written too many accounts from too many racetracks where the pall of death or career-ending injury lay palpable and miserable.
I still feel that way. I still applaud, standing, NASCAR's adoption of every single safety measure, and more, advocated by the experts I brought into the discussion in the terrible outbreak of death by basilar skull fracture in 2000-01. Most of those Ph.D.s and M.D.s are now paid consultants for NASCAR.
Still I wonder whether, in doing the right thing -- the only thing, given the scientific capabilities -- racing has had to remove a rudimentary element of its electrifying appeal: the intangible edge on the human spirit during an event that involves high risk.
For a few months after the day Earnhardt didn't climb out, Feb. 18, 2001 at Daytona, NASCAR's television ratings spiked to their highest levels ever. They have declined, pretty much steadily, ever since.
In death he finally made the cover of Sports Illustrated, a place I'd failed to get him in life, during the nine years I worked there, through the prime of his career. Its sister magazine, Time, put him on the cover too, with a story that contained some information I'd written in SI stories that didn't make the cover, information now deemed more interesting to the masses because he was suddenly dead.
Driving the TV-ratings spike in the Earnhardt aftermath were male viewers ages 18-34, the demographic advertisers covet most. After the TV roller coaster, I kept getting this image of youth in droves, parking their dirt bikes and skateboards and saying to one another, "Man, dudes actually die at this NASCAR stuff, so I better check it out."
Then, HANS devices in place, soft walls under construction, danger radically reduced, the youths apparently returned to watching the X Games.
But throughout the aftermath of Earnhardt I felt this: He himself wouldn't have been disgusted by it all, for nobody understood the mass appeal of danger more than Earnhardt. It made him, he knew. And it would destroy him, he seemed to sense all along. And he accepted that.
He once showed me a letter from a woman asking him to drive her husband's hearse from the church to the grave. It had been the man's dying wish.
I knew how Earnhardt was -- he wouldn't go to funerals even for close friends such as Neil Bonnett and Davey Allison. Death was too real, too looming in his own life, too clear and present a danger to Earnhardt all the time.
Knowing this, and having been the victim of his chops-busting humor many a time, I went right back at him over the hearse-driving request. I dropped the letter onto the coffee table between us and asked, "Well? Did you do it?"
"Shee-ee-ee-IT, no!" he said.
And then he muttered: "I'll be in one of them bitches soon enough."
This was six-plus years before his death. Only months before it, amid much driver unrest over the deaths of Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin Jr., Earnhardt famously admonished his skittish peers:
"Put a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up there and eat your candy ass."
I wonder if that isn't what you miss most about him, the seven championships and 76 wins just being the rationale on which you would have rioted had he been left out of NASCAR's very first Hall of Fame class.
But Earnhardt was the paradox of indescribable enormity in NASCAR. A realm always on the bittersweet edge of danger due to the occasional reminders, the deaths of lesser names, could not bear the death of its biggest, its literally most-worshipped star ever.
This was too much. Something had to be done.
It was a flashback to what had happened in Formula One in 1994, when its own man deemed invulnerable to dying in a race car, Ayrton Senna, was killed at Imola, Italy.
The very next race, at Monaco, I sat with F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone in his motor coach in the paddock on race morning, saw the urgency in his face as he looked me in the eye, and heard him utter the words that would begin the worldwide safety revolution that, by now, has changed the electrifying nature of motor racing everywhere forever:
"It is necessary to give out the message to the world that we're not people who don't care."
They had to end the image of blood sport, even in the one so long regarded as the most dangerous -- and therefore somehow romantic -- sport of all, Grand Prix racing.
That they did. The high-tech safety revolution began, though it would not reach NASCAR for seven more years, and the very real death of its own perceived immortal, Earnhardt.
By 1997, Jacques Villeneuve, soon after winning the world driving championship, got into big trouble with the FIA for telling the BBC that Formula One was losing its appeal because it just wasn't dangerous enough anymore.
This was not from a cavalier driver in youthful denial. Nobody in F1 understood death on the track better, more personally. His father, Gilles Villeneuve, had been killed when Jacques was only 11, during qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix in 1982.
Yet what Jacques said was terribly incorrect politically, because F1 was in the third year of its massive safety and public-relations overhaul.
That didn't mean he wasn't right.
Joey Logano's recent wreck at Dover is a prime example of how we in the media grasp at any remaining straw of the danger element, try to magnify it, bring it back.
The very idea that Logano could have been seriously hurt in that car, in that seat, wearing that helmet and HANS, in that simple rollover, was -- well -- borderline absurd.
But he said it scared him -- of course it did, in a generation of drivers who seem to sense they're playing video games until the simulator jars them enough to remind them that crashing really can hurt.
The commentators were breathless as the replays of Logano's roll went on and on, in slow motion and real time, ad nauseam.
See? Grasping at a straw of something fleeting, nearly gone, trying to bring it back.
We all are human and we all are mortal and we all are trying to deal with that, and seeing the nearness of death is somehow a part of our preparation.
My longtime friend and writing guru, Frank Deford, broke his career-long silence on the subject of auto racing -- he'd often kidded me about the garishness of it -- in the aftermath of Earnhardt. NASCAR, Deford concluded, is indeed "a slice of American life … and death."
Our greatest living novelist, the enigmatic Cormac McCarthy, slipped out of seclusion a couple of years ago for one TV interview, in which he said he does not understand writers who do not deal in matters of life and death.
Given racing today, I wonder if the man who gained fame and fortune by being the most overtly human and mortal of us all, Ernest Hemingway, would have said what he said: "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering, all the others being games."
I wonder if he'd have listed only two. He's not around to ask, so I'm asking you:
Have science and society and their mandates to do the right thing, the humane thing, and the pundits like me who preached it …
Have we reduced your once-deadly, once-electrifying sport to just another game?
I shall now ask you the fans the toughest, touchiest, most personal, most politically incorrect question I have ever asked you:
Is racing dangerous enough for you anymore?
This bears asking, in light of your massively expressed discontent and growing apathy toward NASCAR. I wonder if the radical reduction of danger in the safety revolution isn't at the root of it all.
Don't get me wrong. I never have been one of those who believed the masses came to motor races to see people get killed.
But I have always believed you came, in some measure, to sense that death and serious injury were being narrowly avoided before your eyes.
I could hear it in your thunderous cheers whenever a Dale Earnhardt or a Tim Richmond would climb out of a demolished car and wave to the crowd. Or a Rick Mears would rise laughing out of a pile of rubble at Indy.
Before Jimmie Johnson rocketed from obscurity at the lesser levels to astounding success in Cup, his entire career highlight film lasted less than a minute: one horrific crash at Watkins Glen, head-on into a barrier that exploded; he jumped right out of the wreckage and onto the roof of his Busch car, and thrust both arms skyward.
Both he and the crowd were clearly exhilarated by his triumph over near-disaster. I wonder if your current apathy toward him is, in part, because he's had no moments like that in Cup.
I'm not pushing you onto a psychiatric couch here. I'm just asking about human nature, the anthropological fact of fascination with, say, the high-wire artist, the matador, the Navy SEAL, or -- in the analogy once drawn for me by NASCAR president Mike Helton -- the fighter pilot.
Atop that list of the daring, for more than a century between the first automobile race in 1894 and this, the fruition of the racing safety revolution, was the racing driver.
These past few years you have told me in droves that NASCAR has become boring -- "BO-ring," you often spell it -- via e-mail and comments on the ESPN Conversation pages. Yet NASCAR publicists bombard me constantly with computer-acquired "loop data" meant to prove, mathematically, that there's more passing, closer racing, fewer runaway wins than ever before.
So all I can rely on are my own eyes and memory, and I cannot for the life of me see that the racing is any more or less boring than it ever was whenever fields get strung out, and someone leads and leads and leads. Johnson does it, but so did Richard Petty.
You roundly say you despise the Car of Tomorrow because it's awkward and further dampens the racing, and because it is essentially a kit car neutered of make.
The new car is aesthetically ugly beyond question, and drivers tell us it's a handful and a clunker. Beyond that, I can't see how it has necessarily hurt the racing -- unless we're constantly watching the driver, inside the car, fighting the wheel and the brake pedal.
As for brand identification, they all looked the same to me a decade before the COT came along. It started in 1997 when NASCAR let Ford get away with a racing Taurus that looked nothing like a street Taurus, and the aerodynamics war went out of control from there, until they were all prototypes, none recognizable from the showroom namesakes.
I wonder whether the real issue with the new car, conscious or subconscious, is that its purpose has been too thoroughly fulfilled -- that it is too safe.
You say the drivers, including Johnson, are mostly vanilla. I wonder if it's more that you don't detect that distinct aura of swagger in men who knew and accepted, whenever a starting grid rolled off the pit road, that they might not make it back.
For the record, no journalist was more vocal than I on behalf of the HANS, soft walls, safer seats, moving the driver more toward the center of the car, and energy-dissipating materials in the cars.
It had gotten to the point that the price of the occasional reminders of the danger was too dear. I'd written too many accounts from too many racetracks where the pall of death or career-ending injury lay palpable and miserable.
I still feel that way. I still applaud, standing, NASCAR's adoption of every single safety measure, and more, advocated by the experts I brought into the discussion in the terrible outbreak of death by basilar skull fracture in 2000-01. Most of those Ph.D.s and M.D.s are now paid consultants for NASCAR.
Still I wonder whether, in doing the right thing -- the only thing, given the scientific capabilities -- racing has had to remove a rudimentary element of its electrifying appeal: the intangible edge on the human spirit during an event that involves high risk.
For a few months after the day Earnhardt didn't climb out, Feb. 18, 2001 at Daytona, NASCAR's television ratings spiked to their highest levels ever. They have declined, pretty much steadily, ever since.
In death he finally made the cover of Sports Illustrated, a place I'd failed to get him in life, during the nine years I worked there, through the prime of his career. Its sister magazine, Time, put him on the cover too, with a story that contained some information I'd written in SI stories that didn't make the cover, information now deemed more interesting to the masses because he was suddenly dead.
Driving the TV-ratings spike in the Earnhardt aftermath were male viewers ages 18-34, the demographic advertisers covet most. After the TV roller coaster, I kept getting this image of youth in droves, parking their dirt bikes and skateboards and saying to one another, "Man, dudes actually die at this NASCAR stuff, so I better check it out."
Then, HANS devices in place, soft walls under construction, danger radically reduced, the youths apparently returned to watching the X Games.
But throughout the aftermath of Earnhardt I felt this: He himself wouldn't have been disgusted by it all, for nobody understood the mass appeal of danger more than Earnhardt. It made him, he knew. And it would destroy him, he seemed to sense all along. And he accepted that.
He once showed me a letter from a woman asking him to drive her husband's hearse from the church to the grave. It had been the man's dying wish.
I knew how Earnhardt was -- he wouldn't go to funerals even for close friends such as Neil Bonnett and Davey Allison. Death was too real, too looming in his own life, too clear and present a danger to Earnhardt all the time.
Knowing this, and having been the victim of his chops-busting humor many a time, I went right back at him over the hearse-driving request. I dropped the letter onto the coffee table between us and asked, "Well? Did you do it?"
"Shee-ee-ee-IT, no!" he said.
And then he muttered: "I'll be in one of them bitches soon enough."
This was six-plus years before his death. Only months before it, amid much driver unrest over the deaths of Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin Jr., Earnhardt famously admonished his skittish peers:
"Put a kerosene rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up there and eat your candy ass."
I wonder if that isn't what you miss most about him, the seven championships and 76 wins just being the rationale on which you would have rioted had he been left out of NASCAR's very first Hall of Fame class.
But Earnhardt was the paradox of indescribable enormity in NASCAR. A realm always on the bittersweet edge of danger due to the occasional reminders, the deaths of lesser names, could not bear the death of its biggest, its literally most-worshipped star ever.
This was too much. Something had to be done.
It was a flashback to what had happened in Formula One in 1994, when its own man deemed invulnerable to dying in a race car, Ayrton Senna, was killed at Imola, Italy.
The very next race, at Monaco, I sat with F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone in his motor coach in the paddock on race morning, saw the urgency in his face as he looked me in the eye, and heard him utter the words that would begin the worldwide safety revolution that, by now, has changed the electrifying nature of motor racing everywhere forever:
"It is necessary to give out the message to the world that we're not people who don't care."
They had to end the image of blood sport, even in the one so long regarded as the most dangerous -- and therefore somehow romantic -- sport of all, Grand Prix racing.
That they did. The high-tech safety revolution began, though it would not reach NASCAR for seven more years, and the very real death of its own perceived immortal, Earnhardt.
By 1997, Jacques Villeneuve, soon after winning the world driving championship, got into big trouble with the FIA for telling the BBC that Formula One was losing its appeal because it just wasn't dangerous enough anymore.
This was not from a cavalier driver in youthful denial. Nobody in F1 understood death on the track better, more personally. His father, Gilles Villeneuve, had been killed when Jacques was only 11, during qualifying for the Belgian Grand Prix in 1982.
Yet what Jacques said was terribly incorrect politically, because F1 was in the third year of its massive safety and public-relations overhaul.
That didn't mean he wasn't right.
Joey Logano's recent wreck at Dover is a prime example of how we in the media grasp at any remaining straw of the danger element, try to magnify it, bring it back.
The very idea that Logano could have been seriously hurt in that car, in that seat, wearing that helmet and HANS, in that simple rollover, was -- well -- borderline absurd.
But he said it scared him -- of course it did, in a generation of drivers who seem to sense they're playing video games until the simulator jars them enough to remind them that crashing really can hurt.
The commentators were breathless as the replays of Logano's roll went on and on, in slow motion and real time, ad nauseam.
See? Grasping at a straw of something fleeting, nearly gone, trying to bring it back.
We all are human and we all are mortal and we all are trying to deal with that, and seeing the nearness of death is somehow a part of our preparation.
My longtime friend and writing guru, Frank Deford, broke his career-long silence on the subject of auto racing -- he'd often kidded me about the garishness of it -- in the aftermath of Earnhardt. NASCAR, Deford concluded, is indeed "a slice of American life … and death."
Our greatest living novelist, the enigmatic Cormac McCarthy, slipped out of seclusion a couple of years ago for one TV interview, in which he said he does not understand writers who do not deal in matters of life and death.
Given racing today, I wonder if the man who gained fame and fortune by being the most overtly human and mortal of us all, Ernest Hemingway, would have said what he said: "There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering, all the others being games."
I wonder if he'd have listed only two. He's not around to ask, so I'm asking you:
Have science and society and their mandates to do the right thing, the humane thing, and the pundits like me who preached it …
Have we reduced your once-deadly, once-electrifying sport to just another game?
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Making of a U.S. Formula One Team
(by Peter Windsor nytimes.com 9-25-09)
The story of the new American team that will race in Formula One next season really begins in 1985. That’s when Honda was supplying its wonderful turbo engines to the Williams team and I was working for Frank Williams as his manager of sponsorship and public affairs.
We luxuriated in the 48,000 square feet, or 4,460 square meters, of the new Williams factory in Didcot, England, south of Oxford — a new facility that included a special Honda engine test area and a one-third scale wind tunnel that had originated at a company in northeastern England, Specialized Mouldings. There, in 1977, Peter Wright and Colin Chapman had discovered the principle now called “ground effect.” At the time, that wind tunnel was the equal of anything in the world.
My office was conveniently placed near the parking lot, which meant that I could watch the ceaseless comings and goings of a Formula One team. It was not long before I noticed the regular appearance of a stocky man in jeans who always headed toward the wind tunnel, a briefcase in hand.
A few inquiries revealed that he was Ken Anderson, a young American engineer who worked for Penske Racing, running their new shock-absorber department. Anderson had started with motocross bikes in the United States, but quickly joined the rapidly expanding Fox shock-absorber company. He then formed a successful working relationship with an off-road racer, Roger Mears, winning major desert events with him before working miracles at the Indy 500.
Soon word was out: Penske’s Rick Mears, Roger’s brother, wanted to know about these amazing Fox shock absorbers that were enabling his brother to run so fast. Roger Penske then hired Anderson to set up a Penske shock-absorber company.
Penske shock absorbers quickly became a mainstay of Formula One. But back in 1985, Williams was the only team using them, on the FW10-Honda; in return for the shock absorbers, Williams allowed Penske to use its wind tunnel for development of its British-built Indy car. Thus Anderson’s regular visits to the Williams factory.
Anderson and I became good friends. We quickly discovered that we loved the same things — Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, for example, and the details of the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space missions. We began to talk about putting our own race team together — first in the United States (with an Indy Racing League team in the mid-1990s) and, more recently, a Formula One team.
Anderson first contacted me about his Formula One idea in 2006. He had built the Falcon IndyCar in 2002 in Charlotte, North Carolina (the car never raced because of a sudden change in the I.R.L./IndyCar engine regulations) and he was now working as an engineer at Haas/C.N.C. Racing, a Nascar team financed by Gene Haas. Anderson said that he had convinced Haas to finance the design and construction of a full-scale, rolling-road wind tunnel in North Carolina and that he, Anderson, was going to manage the project. If he could pull that off, he promised, then a Formula One team would be the next step.
I followed the progress of what would become the Windshear wind tunnel. By the end of 2007, Anderson had finished the tunnel ahead of schedule and under budget. Most of today’s top Formula One teams spent time in Windshear in 2008 and virtually all of them declared it to be the best tunnel in the world. From there, our American Formula One team was but a short step away.
The overriding principle of our project is that, contrary to current wisdom, it is possible to design and build a Formula One car in the United States (rather than in Europe, where all the current teams build their cars). Why would we want to do that? There are a number of good reasons:
Much of the current Formula One technology originates in the United States.
It is much more cost-efficient to design and build in the United States than in Europe (as such car companies as BMW, Mercedes, Honda and Toyota have proven over the years).
Europe is crowded. It’s fine for Ferrari in Italy or McLaren in England, but for all other Formula One teams, it is a case of playing catch-up or paying prices at a premium, particularly when it comes to recruitment and supply.
The Formula One calendar is now based at least 50 percent outside Europe. Never has the sport been so “global.”
By basing ourselves in the United States, we would have the “pick of the bunch” from all the key suppliers, most of whom have been a part of Anderson’s world for the past 20 years.
As a national team, we would start from a unique marketing base. We would plan to race American drivers in the medium term and to build a conduit for them, from grassroots racing to Formula One. The large majority of our staff would be American. We would give talented American engineers and technicians a chance to work on a world stage to which they have not had access in recent decades. On the car’s nose would be marked, “Made in America.”
From the start, we had no doubts about the technical base of the team. The obvious first move was to base it near the Windshear tunnel. We found a building with not a little motor sports history: the original “Hall of Fame” race team’s headquarters, where such Nascar stars as Kyle Busch started their careers.
The logistics, of course, were another matter. We would have to pay for all the travel to and from Europe, but, even so, the figures made sense. We could have our cars and team personnel back in Charlotte after a race like the Spanish Grand Prix faster than the average British-based team would have its trucks back in England, and for virtually no increase in cost. We would join the other Formula One teams for the “flyaway” race logistics — and we would treat the European double-headers just like any other team: We would simply truck our cars to the next race.
We would need, however, a European logistics base. This, in turn, opened another door in our thinking.
We had decided that if we were going to be based in Charlotte, in the heart of Nascar country, then obviously we would have to play to the fans, as Nascar does. We would make our factory “fan friendly,” with easy access to the public, and, with a television production facility in the factory, we would enable Formula One fans to follow the progress of the car from conception to completion.
Our European base would therefore be chosen as much for its location as for its excellent facilities. We want it to be the sort of place that our sponsors, fans and investors want to visit, something different than the standard, murky building on an English industrial estate.
Finally, there was the timeframe of operation — and this, in turn, was linked to the way we wanted to build and run the team. To finance the formation of the team and the construction of the cars in 2009, we would sell a stake in the company to a group of the right sort of investors — people who believed in us, loved Formula One and could see that this team was approaching the future in a new way and was in it for the long haul, not for a quick turnaround.
We were confronted with the global recession, and with a particularly difficult patch of Formula One political turbulence, but at one of our road shows in early February, we met a young man named Chad Hurley, a co-founder of YouTube and now the chief executive of YouTube for Google.
In a Silicon Valley café, Chad asked us a million questions about Formula One and our project. He grasped it immediately: the beauty of a new, creative U.S. team taking on the big guns. For an American to stand up and effectively say, “I believe in F1 as the world’s largest global TV sport” when there is not even a Formula One race in America, let alone an American driver in the series, was magical. For him to believe in us and our innovative concepts was something else again.
I don’t think this would have been possible in a country other than the United States. In Europe, the attitude to the global recession was basically, “Let’s do nothing and hope it goes away.” Americans, it seemed to me in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Chicago, still gave time to the entrepreneur who talked sense and examined the problem from every angle.
Before the recession really hit, no one would believe that we could do the team for substantially less than the Formula One norm. In the recession, people suddenly began to listen to what we had to say. Of course, Formula One’s global reach helped: An average of 50 million people watch Formula One events 18 times a year throughout the world.
There is no guidebook to forming a new Formula One team. We are breaking new ground. In the sense that we are building our complete car in-house, we will be the first all-new Formula One team of the 21st century. We will be the first team of the cellphone-text-message-email-YouTube generation. Without those inventions, Anderson and I could never have kept so many balls in the air for so long in so many different parts of the world. We will be the first team to design and build its cars in the United States since Dan Gurney did so with his Eagles in 1966-67.
It was Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works philosophy that inspired us from the start and it continues to drive us today. When Johnson wrote that success is primarily achieved by employing the minimum number of the best possible people, with the company’s head count controlled in an almost vicious way, he was also writing the philosophy of how a Formula One team should operate from 2010 onward.
The story of the new American team that will race in Formula One next season really begins in 1985. That’s when Honda was supplying its wonderful turbo engines to the Williams team and I was working for Frank Williams as his manager of sponsorship and public affairs.
We luxuriated in the 48,000 square feet, or 4,460 square meters, of the new Williams factory in Didcot, England, south of Oxford — a new facility that included a special Honda engine test area and a one-third scale wind tunnel that had originated at a company in northeastern England, Specialized Mouldings. There, in 1977, Peter Wright and Colin Chapman had discovered the principle now called “ground effect.” At the time, that wind tunnel was the equal of anything in the world.
My office was conveniently placed near the parking lot, which meant that I could watch the ceaseless comings and goings of a Formula One team. It was not long before I noticed the regular appearance of a stocky man in jeans who always headed toward the wind tunnel, a briefcase in hand.
A few inquiries revealed that he was Ken Anderson, a young American engineer who worked for Penske Racing, running their new shock-absorber department. Anderson had started with motocross bikes in the United States, but quickly joined the rapidly expanding Fox shock-absorber company. He then formed a successful working relationship with an off-road racer, Roger Mears, winning major desert events with him before working miracles at the Indy 500.
Soon word was out: Penske’s Rick Mears, Roger’s brother, wanted to know about these amazing Fox shock absorbers that were enabling his brother to run so fast. Roger Penske then hired Anderson to set up a Penske shock-absorber company.
Penske shock absorbers quickly became a mainstay of Formula One. But back in 1985, Williams was the only team using them, on the FW10-Honda; in return for the shock absorbers, Williams allowed Penske to use its wind tunnel for development of its British-built Indy car. Thus Anderson’s regular visits to the Williams factory.
Anderson and I became good friends. We quickly discovered that we loved the same things — Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, for example, and the details of the Gemini, Mercury and Apollo space missions. We began to talk about putting our own race team together — first in the United States (with an Indy Racing League team in the mid-1990s) and, more recently, a Formula One team.
Anderson first contacted me about his Formula One idea in 2006. He had built the Falcon IndyCar in 2002 in Charlotte, North Carolina (the car never raced because of a sudden change in the I.R.L./IndyCar engine regulations) and he was now working as an engineer at Haas/C.N.C. Racing, a Nascar team financed by Gene Haas. Anderson said that he had convinced Haas to finance the design and construction of a full-scale, rolling-road wind tunnel in North Carolina and that he, Anderson, was going to manage the project. If he could pull that off, he promised, then a Formula One team would be the next step.
I followed the progress of what would become the Windshear wind tunnel. By the end of 2007, Anderson had finished the tunnel ahead of schedule and under budget. Most of today’s top Formula One teams spent time in Windshear in 2008 and virtually all of them declared it to be the best tunnel in the world. From there, our American Formula One team was but a short step away.
The overriding principle of our project is that, contrary to current wisdom, it is possible to design and build a Formula One car in the United States (rather than in Europe, where all the current teams build their cars). Why would we want to do that? There are a number of good reasons:
Much of the current Formula One technology originates in the United States.
It is much more cost-efficient to design and build in the United States than in Europe (as such car companies as BMW, Mercedes, Honda and Toyota have proven over the years).
Europe is crowded. It’s fine for Ferrari in Italy or McLaren in England, but for all other Formula One teams, it is a case of playing catch-up or paying prices at a premium, particularly when it comes to recruitment and supply.
The Formula One calendar is now based at least 50 percent outside Europe. Never has the sport been so “global.”
By basing ourselves in the United States, we would have the “pick of the bunch” from all the key suppliers, most of whom have been a part of Anderson’s world for the past 20 years.
As a national team, we would start from a unique marketing base. We would plan to race American drivers in the medium term and to build a conduit for them, from grassroots racing to Formula One. The large majority of our staff would be American. We would give talented American engineers and technicians a chance to work on a world stage to which they have not had access in recent decades. On the car’s nose would be marked, “Made in America.”
From the start, we had no doubts about the technical base of the team. The obvious first move was to base it near the Windshear tunnel. We found a building with not a little motor sports history: the original “Hall of Fame” race team’s headquarters, where such Nascar stars as Kyle Busch started their careers.
The logistics, of course, were another matter. We would have to pay for all the travel to and from Europe, but, even so, the figures made sense. We could have our cars and team personnel back in Charlotte after a race like the Spanish Grand Prix faster than the average British-based team would have its trucks back in England, and for virtually no increase in cost. We would join the other Formula One teams for the “flyaway” race logistics — and we would treat the European double-headers just like any other team: We would simply truck our cars to the next race.
We would need, however, a European logistics base. This, in turn, opened another door in our thinking.
We had decided that if we were going to be based in Charlotte, in the heart of Nascar country, then obviously we would have to play to the fans, as Nascar does. We would make our factory “fan friendly,” with easy access to the public, and, with a television production facility in the factory, we would enable Formula One fans to follow the progress of the car from conception to completion.
Our European base would therefore be chosen as much for its location as for its excellent facilities. We want it to be the sort of place that our sponsors, fans and investors want to visit, something different than the standard, murky building on an English industrial estate.
Finally, there was the timeframe of operation — and this, in turn, was linked to the way we wanted to build and run the team. To finance the formation of the team and the construction of the cars in 2009, we would sell a stake in the company to a group of the right sort of investors — people who believed in us, loved Formula One and could see that this team was approaching the future in a new way and was in it for the long haul, not for a quick turnaround.
We were confronted with the global recession, and with a particularly difficult patch of Formula One political turbulence, but at one of our road shows in early February, we met a young man named Chad Hurley, a co-founder of YouTube and now the chief executive of YouTube for Google.
In a Silicon Valley café, Chad asked us a million questions about Formula One and our project. He grasped it immediately: the beauty of a new, creative U.S. team taking on the big guns. For an American to stand up and effectively say, “I believe in F1 as the world’s largest global TV sport” when there is not even a Formula One race in America, let alone an American driver in the series, was magical. For him to believe in us and our innovative concepts was something else again.
I don’t think this would have been possible in a country other than the United States. In Europe, the attitude to the global recession was basically, “Let’s do nothing and hope it goes away.” Americans, it seemed to me in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Chicago, still gave time to the entrepreneur who talked sense and examined the problem from every angle.
Before the recession really hit, no one would believe that we could do the team for substantially less than the Formula One norm. In the recession, people suddenly began to listen to what we had to say. Of course, Formula One’s global reach helped: An average of 50 million people watch Formula One events 18 times a year throughout the world.
There is no guidebook to forming a new Formula One team. We are breaking new ground. In the sense that we are building our complete car in-house, we will be the first all-new Formula One team of the 21st century. We will be the first team of the cellphone-text-message-email-YouTube generation. Without those inventions, Anderson and I could never have kept so many balls in the air for so long in so many different parts of the world. We will be the first team to design and build its cars in the United States since Dan Gurney did so with his Eagles in 1966-67.
It was Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works philosophy that inspired us from the start and it continues to drive us today. When Johnson wrote that success is primarily achieved by employing the minimum number of the best possible people, with the company’s head count controlled in an almost vicious way, he was also writing the philosophy of how a Formula One team should operate from 2010 onward.
A1GP completes crucial funding deal
(by Matt Beer autosport.com 9-25-09)
A1GP has announced that it has completed a financial restructuring that it is confident will secure the series' long-term future.
There had been growing doubts about the championship's health in recent weeks, with the cars being held by freight company Delivered On Time (DOT) since the end of the 2008/09 season, suggestions that Ferrari was set to recall its engine supply, and with operating company A1GP Operations having been liquidated.
But series boss Tony Teixeira said that the new funding deal would resolve all A1GP's financial concerns and allow the series to begin as planned in Surfers Paradise next month. No specific details of the financial package were released by A1GP, although AUTOSPORT understands that the championship had been in talks with Credit Suisse.
"I wanted to announce this re-financing a long time ago, but the reason it has taken longer than I planned was the size of the package," said Teixeira.
"I could see no reason to look for a one year deal, it had to be for at least three to four years until such a time as the series is independent. This way we can make sure everyone involved in the series has the necessary security and the series is totally creditable."
He added that he was now keen to reassure A1GP's suppliers and partners that the series had a solid future.
"I shall be meeting all of them personally in the next couple of days," said Teixeira. "I want them to understand this is a series that is here to stay on the motorsport scene, and they need to know their involvement is with a series that is going from strength to strength.
"I have seen all the stories written over the past few weeks doubting the future of the series, and these are not new to me as I have seen them at the start of every one of our four seasons. These are not things I like to read and I feel frustrated that I cannot always come out and explain exactly what we are doing, but, as you know, we have always delivered every season and race we have committed to.
"Our intention is to settle all our outstanding creditors prior to the administration hearing, and would like to thank them for their patience and support.
"We at A1GP have been so lucky to have such loyal support from all our stake holders - management and staff, race promoters, team owners, partners, suppliers, TV rights holders, sponsors and last but not least our fans."
A1GP has announced that it has completed a financial restructuring that it is confident will secure the series' long-term future.
There had been growing doubts about the championship's health in recent weeks, with the cars being held by freight company Delivered On Time (DOT) since the end of the 2008/09 season, suggestions that Ferrari was set to recall its engine supply, and with operating company A1GP Operations having been liquidated.
But series boss Tony Teixeira said that the new funding deal would resolve all A1GP's financial concerns and allow the series to begin as planned in Surfers Paradise next month. No specific details of the financial package were released by A1GP, although AUTOSPORT understands that the championship had been in talks with Credit Suisse.
"I wanted to announce this re-financing a long time ago, but the reason it has taken longer than I planned was the size of the package," said Teixeira.
"I could see no reason to look for a one year deal, it had to be for at least three to four years until such a time as the series is independent. This way we can make sure everyone involved in the series has the necessary security and the series is totally creditable."
He added that he was now keen to reassure A1GP's suppliers and partners that the series had a solid future.
"I shall be meeting all of them personally in the next couple of days," said Teixeira. "I want them to understand this is a series that is here to stay on the motorsport scene, and they need to know their involvement is with a series that is going from strength to strength.
"I have seen all the stories written over the past few weeks doubting the future of the series, and these are not new to me as I have seen them at the start of every one of our four seasons. These are not things I like to read and I feel frustrated that I cannot always come out and explain exactly what we are doing, but, as you know, we have always delivered every season and race we have committed to.
"Our intention is to settle all our outstanding creditors prior to the administration hearing, and would like to thank them for their patience and support.
"We at A1GP have been so lucky to have such loyal support from all our stake holders - management and staff, race promoters, team owners, partners, suppliers, TV rights holders, sponsors and last but not least our fans."
Focusing On The Future
(by Bruce Martin versus.com 9-24-09)
While the IndyCar Series teams were preparing for last Saturday’s Indy Japan 300 at Twin Ring Motegi, IndyCar president of competition Brian Barnhart and Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corporation CEO Jeff Belskus talked about the future.
A highly entertaining fight for the series championship will conclude at Homestead-Miami Speedway on October 10 but the work continues for the men who are charged with plotting the course for the future and the first major decision coming up is the announcement of the new engine/car combination for the 2012 season.
Originally, that package was supposed to be announced this past April but with economic uncertainties regarding the international automotive industry that has delayed the decision.
Barnhart, however, said he expects a decision to be announced by the Thanksgiving holiday in November.
“We continue to develop a couple of parallel paths on the chassis with two different designs we are looking at,” Barnhart said. “We have four manufacturers who have expressed interest in participating in the series beginning in 2012. In this environment we feel very good about that. We are proud that with the automotive manufacturers going through what they are going through and four of them expressing interest to run. We are maintaining dialogue with them and hope to hear from them by Thanksgiving.”
The four interested parties include current engine supplier Honda as well as the German triumvirate that includes Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche. All of the German nameplates are owned by the same company so it is likely that just one of those brands will join the series, most likely Volkswagen, which has shown the most interest out of that group.
“The manufacturers are in agreement in terms with engine specifications and the direction they want to go,” Barnhart said. “We have two significantly different chassis packages in terms of appearance and how different and radical they are from what we are running. What we need to do is make a decision on what direction that is going. The one is so radically different it will entail a lot more in terms of R&D, costs and time. We need to be careful not to jump ahead too much but at the same time be consistent with what the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy Racing League have been about and that is evolution.”
Volkswagen wants an inline 4-cylinder turbocharged engine because it replicates the technology used for its passenger cars in Europe. Honda Performance Development favors a 6-cylinder turbocharged formula for the series engine specification.
“We’re not ready to announce that yet but the groups we have talked to are all pretty consistent with what spec they want to go with,” Barnhart said. “We haven’t narrowed it down to the devil in the details but the general specs have been agreed upon.”
Erik Berkman, the president of Honda Performance Development, continues to push for a V-6 engine and is hopeful that the decision on the new engine/car design will come soon.
“I think we are on track for 2012 still,” Berkman said. “I hope that as the season winds down and we go into the offseason that some things speed up that allows us to get the League’s clear direction on what that should be. If we can go into our Christmas break with some clarity to the future plan that we are still on track.
“We’ve been proposing the V-6 all along so I’m hoping we can go that route.”
Honda has stressed its desire for manufacturer completion, which would mean a new company getting involved with the IndyCar Series.
“I’m hopeful we will have some competition in the future,” Berkman reiterated. “This has been an unusual year. I’ve tried to not panic this year and each month this year my optimism is coming back.”
As for the design of the new car, it could look radically different from the current generation IndyCar that has been on the track since 2003. But while it may look different, it is more a subject of evolution, not revolution.
“The car we proposed is relatively feasible,” Berkman said. “It’s an evolutionary design. Honda will stay out of directing the chassis as much as we might have done in the past. We’re going to let the League do their job there. We can make an engine that can fit in the existing car or in a new chassis. We can do whatever.
“The engine we envision is smaller than the current package. If we raise the peak output then we have more heat rejection that we will have to manage. A new car will have room to grow and evolve from there.”
While the IndyCar Series wants to see better performance and innovation from the new design, safety remains the No. 1 objective of the new car.
And that is where the “Laws of Unintended Consequences” arise. Despite computer simulations and data research, the only way to find out how a car holds up under a crash is to actually crash it.
Any volunteers to serve as a test driver for that?
“We’ve had an interesting process in the last 18 months with the design project initiated by Honda with what the next chassis and iconic look should look like,” Barnhart said. “It’s a really delicate balance of form following function and the evolution of what we’ve had for the last 30 years. We have to be comfortable in how to race that car but more important how to crash that car.
“With the Will Power and Nelson Philippe crash at Infineon, to look at the level of that accident, the cars behaved exactly what they were designed to and you compare that to what has happened in previous years in similar accidents the level of injuries the driver sustained were considerably less than what was experienced previously. Those cars did what we needed them to do.
“If you make radical changes from the evolution of what this car has been for 30 years you’re going to have to go through a lot of work to make sure that whether it’s Tony Kanaan’s crash at Indianapolis or Vitor Meira’s crash at Indianapolis or what happened at Infineon all of those cars behaved as we thought they would and designed them to.
“Kanaan’s car down the backstretch sheered the right side off on the first impact and the second impact was one of the most violent impacts with nothing left on the right side. It did what we wanted them to do especially with the anti-intrusion panels we put on several years back.
“That is the kind of stuff you have to be careful with. If you are going to go out in terms of design and evolution you have to do your due diligence to not only race them but crash them to make sure they are safe.”
And then there is the economy.
By introducing a new engine/chassis package for 2012, that means every team in the series will have to pay for new cars and that could lead to a smaller field as some of the lesser-funded teams struggle to find the money for new equipment.
“The economy is a huge part and with this kind of R&D it isn’t cheap. It’s a very important aspect of that from a lot of different angles. When you package all of that together it’s a very important aspect from a lot of different angles. The teams ability to pay for it, the fact we have manufacturers interested in what we are doing, what the cost is going to be for R&D, it’s not much different for other businesses because money drives a huge part of it.”
AND THE WINNER IN BRAZIL IS?
IndyCar Series officials hope to announce the location for the 2010 season-opening race in Brazil imminently.
“We hope to know about Brazil within the next 10 days or so which location it will be,” Barnhart said. “They are all in the running over there. Terry and Tony Cottman have spent a week down there so we are working out the details.”
Terry Angstadt, the president, commercial division, of the IndyCar Series spent time in Brazil working out the details before departing for Japan last week.
“We are between Salvador and Rio,” Angstadt confirmed. “Both communities are still very engaged and we hope to make that opportunity any day. The desire is mutual because it appears all the funding is in place. It’s six weeks later than we would have liked for it to be.”
Belskus, who holds the overall responsibility for both the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy Racing League in his role as IMS Corporation CEO, believes the IndyCar Series should pursue international races only if they make sense; that otherwise IndyCar should focus on building its domestic product.
“These international events are important to us,” Belskus said. “We need a compelling reason to do the international events and it is important from that perspective. For Japan, it’s because of Honda. To the extent we have those associations it’s important but we will still be looking at three or four international events as the most. I don’t see it as a significant portion of our schedule.
“We’re still talking to a group in China to bring an IndyCar race to that country. It’s still on the table and still an opportunity. It is a work in progress for us. That’s a 2011 or 2012 sort of conversation.”
A FAN OF THE TWO-DAY FORMAT
Barnhart contended that the two-day format has worked well for most of its events this season. That calls for practice and qualifications one day with the race the following day.
“The two day shows work really well on the ovals,” Barnhart said. “The challenging ones are the shows where there is expense setting up the race track like St. Pete and Toronto and Edmonton and Long Beach. Theexpenses the promoter has in setting up those events certainly justify making that a three-day show. But we are so familiar with the cars we are running that we get a lot of laps in practice so the two-day show works really well on the ovals. You balance it out from that aspect.
“When we go to a three-day show it seems like we are there forever.”
INDYCAR CLOSING IN ON A SERIES TITLE SPONSOR
IndyCar Series officials are hopeful of announcing a title sponsor for the series at the season-finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“Terry Angstadt and his guys are working real hard at that and we are optimistic we can put something together,” Belskus said. “It’s a work in progress. We want the right sponsor. We spend time talking about fair value and what we think it’s worth we’re far more excited about being associated with a brand we should be associated with. Hopefully, we can find a situation that is fair value for that and brings a brand to the table that we want to be associated with.”
Angstadt remains optimistic after recent meetings with the potential sponsor.
“We’ve had the sixth meeting with a potential sponsor,” Angstadt said. “We had the VERSUS folks with them last week and the ABC people with them this week. If they make the decision it will be good for us and will be very well supported. It’s a consumer product.”
JOB PERFORMANCE REVIEW
It’s been 12 weeks since Jeff Belskus took over the leadership role of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corporation after Tony George was ousted from the family-controlled board of directors. Each week, Belskus has been more comfortable in his role as CEO.
“I think it has gone as well as anyone could expect it to go,” Belskus said. “I’m pleased with the way it has gone. Tony George and I have a good working relationship and I’m happy about that. I’m still spending a lot of time learning the lay of the land in some respects. I’ve visited the folks at Honda and on the racing teams. It’s been a great learning experience in 10 weeks and I feel good about the way it has gone.”
Belskus prefers a three-week “Month of May” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the annual Indianapolis 500 while some have considered cutting one week out of the schedule.
“I do see value in keeping it the way it is, “Belskus said. “In a lot of ways it’s a tradeoff between tradition and value. We need to do what we can to keep as many traditions alive as we can and sort out the ones that are critically important to us and our mission. We continue to have those conversations every year.”
Belskus has also become a big fan of the IndyCar Series 10-year contract with VERSUS because it gives more television time exposure to the sport.
“The VERSUS telecasts have been outstanding,” Belskus said. “Everyone seems to have enjoyed them and there is a lot of energy in them. We are prepared to go through a transition because VERSUS doesn’t have the distribution that ESPN may have but we can be patient while that grows. We have a lot of resources available to us.
“I negotiated the television contract with ABC and ESPN in 2000 and I remember in 1999 it was such a patchwork between FOX SportsNet and ABC and CBS. What we have today is so much better than where we were at that point in time. It’s a huge improvement. VERSUS is a good partner and will be a good partner for us.
“It’s about exposure and to the way we can maximize exposure is very important to the teams. That is reflected in ratings but coverage times as well. The beauty of the VERSUS telecast is it is a longer telecast than what we’ve had before. We continue to look for ways to provide as much coverage as we can to every competitor.”
“Danica Patrick is great for our series and an important part of our series. I’m optimistic about that. We hope to see
While the IndyCar Series teams were preparing for last Saturday’s Indy Japan 300 at Twin Ring Motegi, IndyCar president of competition Brian Barnhart and Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corporation CEO Jeff Belskus talked about the future.
A highly entertaining fight for the series championship will conclude at Homestead-Miami Speedway on October 10 but the work continues for the men who are charged with plotting the course for the future and the first major decision coming up is the announcement of the new engine/car combination for the 2012 season.
Originally, that package was supposed to be announced this past April but with economic uncertainties regarding the international automotive industry that has delayed the decision.
Barnhart, however, said he expects a decision to be announced by the Thanksgiving holiday in November.
“We continue to develop a couple of parallel paths on the chassis with two different designs we are looking at,” Barnhart said. “We have four manufacturers who have expressed interest in participating in the series beginning in 2012. In this environment we feel very good about that. We are proud that with the automotive manufacturers going through what they are going through and four of them expressing interest to run. We are maintaining dialogue with them and hope to hear from them by Thanksgiving.”
The four interested parties include current engine supplier Honda as well as the German triumvirate that includes Volkswagen, Audi and Porsche. All of the German nameplates are owned by the same company so it is likely that just one of those brands will join the series, most likely Volkswagen, which has shown the most interest out of that group.
“The manufacturers are in agreement in terms with engine specifications and the direction they want to go,” Barnhart said. “We have two significantly different chassis packages in terms of appearance and how different and radical they are from what we are running. What we need to do is make a decision on what direction that is going. The one is so radically different it will entail a lot more in terms of R&D, costs and time. We need to be careful not to jump ahead too much but at the same time be consistent with what the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy Racing League have been about and that is evolution.”
Volkswagen wants an inline 4-cylinder turbocharged engine because it replicates the technology used for its passenger cars in Europe. Honda Performance Development favors a 6-cylinder turbocharged formula for the series engine specification.
“We’re not ready to announce that yet but the groups we have talked to are all pretty consistent with what spec they want to go with,” Barnhart said. “We haven’t narrowed it down to the devil in the details but the general specs have been agreed upon.”
Erik Berkman, the president of Honda Performance Development, continues to push for a V-6 engine and is hopeful that the decision on the new engine/car design will come soon.
“I think we are on track for 2012 still,” Berkman said. “I hope that as the season winds down and we go into the offseason that some things speed up that allows us to get the League’s clear direction on what that should be. If we can go into our Christmas break with some clarity to the future plan that we are still on track.
“We’ve been proposing the V-6 all along so I’m hoping we can go that route.”
Honda has stressed its desire for manufacturer completion, which would mean a new company getting involved with the IndyCar Series.
“I’m hopeful we will have some competition in the future,” Berkman reiterated. “This has been an unusual year. I’ve tried to not panic this year and each month this year my optimism is coming back.”
As for the design of the new car, it could look radically different from the current generation IndyCar that has been on the track since 2003. But while it may look different, it is more a subject of evolution, not revolution.
“The car we proposed is relatively feasible,” Berkman said. “It’s an evolutionary design. Honda will stay out of directing the chassis as much as we might have done in the past. We’re going to let the League do their job there. We can make an engine that can fit in the existing car or in a new chassis. We can do whatever.
“The engine we envision is smaller than the current package. If we raise the peak output then we have more heat rejection that we will have to manage. A new car will have room to grow and evolve from there.”
While the IndyCar Series wants to see better performance and innovation from the new design, safety remains the No. 1 objective of the new car.
And that is where the “Laws of Unintended Consequences” arise. Despite computer simulations and data research, the only way to find out how a car holds up under a crash is to actually crash it.
Any volunteers to serve as a test driver for that?
“We’ve had an interesting process in the last 18 months with the design project initiated by Honda with what the next chassis and iconic look should look like,” Barnhart said. “It’s a really delicate balance of form following function and the evolution of what we’ve had for the last 30 years. We have to be comfortable in how to race that car but more important how to crash that car.
“With the Will Power and Nelson Philippe crash at Infineon, to look at the level of that accident, the cars behaved exactly what they were designed to and you compare that to what has happened in previous years in similar accidents the level of injuries the driver sustained were considerably less than what was experienced previously. Those cars did what we needed them to do.
“If you make radical changes from the evolution of what this car has been for 30 years you’re going to have to go through a lot of work to make sure that whether it’s Tony Kanaan’s crash at Indianapolis or Vitor Meira’s crash at Indianapolis or what happened at Infineon all of those cars behaved as we thought they would and designed them to.
“Kanaan’s car down the backstretch sheered the right side off on the first impact and the second impact was one of the most violent impacts with nothing left on the right side. It did what we wanted them to do especially with the anti-intrusion panels we put on several years back.
“That is the kind of stuff you have to be careful with. If you are going to go out in terms of design and evolution you have to do your due diligence to not only race them but crash them to make sure they are safe.”
And then there is the economy.
By introducing a new engine/chassis package for 2012, that means every team in the series will have to pay for new cars and that could lead to a smaller field as some of the lesser-funded teams struggle to find the money for new equipment.
“The economy is a huge part and with this kind of R&D it isn’t cheap. It’s a very important aspect of that from a lot of different angles. When you package all of that together it’s a very important aspect from a lot of different angles. The teams ability to pay for it, the fact we have manufacturers interested in what we are doing, what the cost is going to be for R&D, it’s not much different for other businesses because money drives a huge part of it.”
AND THE WINNER IN BRAZIL IS?
IndyCar Series officials hope to announce the location for the 2010 season-opening race in Brazil imminently.
“We hope to know about Brazil within the next 10 days or so which location it will be,” Barnhart said. “They are all in the running over there. Terry and Tony Cottman have spent a week down there so we are working out the details.”
Terry Angstadt, the president, commercial division, of the IndyCar Series spent time in Brazil working out the details before departing for Japan last week.
“We are between Salvador and Rio,” Angstadt confirmed. “Both communities are still very engaged and we hope to make that opportunity any day. The desire is mutual because it appears all the funding is in place. It’s six weeks later than we would have liked for it to be.”
Belskus, who holds the overall responsibility for both the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Indy Racing League in his role as IMS Corporation CEO, believes the IndyCar Series should pursue international races only if they make sense; that otherwise IndyCar should focus on building its domestic product.
“These international events are important to us,” Belskus said. “We need a compelling reason to do the international events and it is important from that perspective. For Japan, it’s because of Honda. To the extent we have those associations it’s important but we will still be looking at three or four international events as the most. I don’t see it as a significant portion of our schedule.
“We’re still talking to a group in China to bring an IndyCar race to that country. It’s still on the table and still an opportunity. It is a work in progress for us. That’s a 2011 or 2012 sort of conversation.”
A FAN OF THE TWO-DAY FORMAT
Barnhart contended that the two-day format has worked well for most of its events this season. That calls for practice and qualifications one day with the race the following day.
“The two day shows work really well on the ovals,” Barnhart said. “The challenging ones are the shows where there is expense setting up the race track like St. Pete and Toronto and Edmonton and Long Beach. Theexpenses the promoter has in setting up those events certainly justify making that a three-day show. But we are so familiar with the cars we are running that we get a lot of laps in practice so the two-day show works really well on the ovals. You balance it out from that aspect.
“When we go to a three-day show it seems like we are there forever.”
INDYCAR CLOSING IN ON A SERIES TITLE SPONSOR
IndyCar Series officials are hopeful of announcing a title sponsor for the series at the season-finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“Terry Angstadt and his guys are working real hard at that and we are optimistic we can put something together,” Belskus said. “It’s a work in progress. We want the right sponsor. We spend time talking about fair value and what we think it’s worth we’re far more excited about being associated with a brand we should be associated with. Hopefully, we can find a situation that is fair value for that and brings a brand to the table that we want to be associated with.”
Angstadt remains optimistic after recent meetings with the potential sponsor.
“We’ve had the sixth meeting with a potential sponsor,” Angstadt said. “We had the VERSUS folks with them last week and the ABC people with them this week. If they make the decision it will be good for us and will be very well supported. It’s a consumer product.”
JOB PERFORMANCE REVIEW
It’s been 12 weeks since Jeff Belskus took over the leadership role of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corporation after Tony George was ousted from the family-controlled board of directors. Each week, Belskus has been more comfortable in his role as CEO.
“I think it has gone as well as anyone could expect it to go,” Belskus said. “I’m pleased with the way it has gone. Tony George and I have a good working relationship and I’m happy about that. I’m still spending a lot of time learning the lay of the land in some respects. I’ve visited the folks at Honda and on the racing teams. It’s been a great learning experience in 10 weeks and I feel good about the way it has gone.”
Belskus prefers a three-week “Month of May” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the annual Indianapolis 500 while some have considered cutting one week out of the schedule.
“I do see value in keeping it the way it is, “Belskus said. “In a lot of ways it’s a tradeoff between tradition and value. We need to do what we can to keep as many traditions alive as we can and sort out the ones that are critically important to us and our mission. We continue to have those conversations every year.”
Belskus has also become a big fan of the IndyCar Series 10-year contract with VERSUS because it gives more television time exposure to the sport.
“The VERSUS telecasts have been outstanding,” Belskus said. “Everyone seems to have enjoyed them and there is a lot of energy in them. We are prepared to go through a transition because VERSUS doesn’t have the distribution that ESPN may have but we can be patient while that grows. We have a lot of resources available to us.
“I negotiated the television contract with ABC and ESPN in 2000 and I remember in 1999 it was such a patchwork between FOX SportsNet and ABC and CBS. What we have today is so much better than where we were at that point in time. It’s a huge improvement. VERSUS is a good partner and will be a good partner for us.
“It’s about exposure and to the way we can maximize exposure is very important to the teams. That is reflected in ratings but coverage times as well. The beauty of the VERSUS telecast is it is a longer telecast than what we’ve had before. We continue to look for ways to provide as much coverage as we can to every competitor.”
“Danica Patrick is great for our series and an important part of our series. I’m optimistic about that. We hope to see
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