The three-headed monster of Indy 500 fandom
by Tony Johns on May 8, 2012 4:20 PM EDT
in Blog Posts
The month of May is just over a week old, but already the battle lines are drawn.
In one corner are the loyalists, the die-hards, the true believers for whom the grand dame at 16th and Georgetown is Mecca.
In another corner are loyalists of another stripe - fans who were reluctantly "unified" after years of conflict, fans who spent years doggedly whittling down the importance of the Greatest Spectacle in their minds to satisfy their chosen series' politics.
Then there is a third group, the great (and, some say, largely theoretical) mass of "event fans," composed of the same people who tune in every year for the Kentucky Derby, the U.S. Open, the Super Bowl, and other "keystone" events but largely ignore the sport in question the rest of the time.
The challenge before INDYCAR is to figure out a way to satisfy all three of those groups. In fact, it is arguably INDYCAR's biggest challenge if it hopes to survive in the future.
5 commentsOur business: the entitlement of INDYCAR fans as consumers
by Tony Johns on May 3, 2012 2:05 PM EDT
in Blog Posts
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the dangers of gloom-and-doom pessimism and the penchant for IndyCar fans to overindulge themselves in it. I still stand by that assessment.
But there is a flip side to that equation that is just as dangerous as wallowing in a morass of Chicken Little philosophy.
Like all businesses, INDYCAR and its assorted partners need to have a positive self-image in order to keep revenues flowing in and maintain their customer base. So with the outlets they possess, they will pursue, shall we say, an aggressively optimistic public stance. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, either.
The problem comes when an aggressively optimistic public stance mutates beyond that yardstick and becomes a fantasy construct, wherein the expectation for the consumer is not simply to have a positive mental attitude about the business, but is in fact encouraged to willfully minimize or even ignore the product's shortcomings out of a sense of loyalty -worse, a loyalty that the business intimates is violated by any hint of second-guessing.
INDYCAR: The Friday Setup (Brazil)
by fleshwound_NPG on Apr 27, 2012 6:17 PM EDT
in Blog Posts
"The Friday Setup" will be a preview of the upcoming races and the schedule of the weekend events (practice and qualifications) leading up to race day. Also it will include other forms of rambling about the upcoming race (and the overall state of IndyCar) by yours truly, because I got to somehow bring up the word-count so SBNation will allow the posting of this article/schedule so you can see it. Or something like that.
Normally I'm supposed to at least a proper preview the upcoming race, but being this is Brazil and there's a chance for rain most of the weekend I can't quite, and no one else can. In year one of this event we saw Mario Moraes decide to park his car on Marco Andretti's head on lap one turn one and less than an hour later there was a hailstorm. In year two we saw Helio, Danica, and Simona decide to create a very awkward threesome on lap one turn two...in a downpour. That was the second year in a row there was a race-altering storm/downpour and we could see another Sunday, if not during practice/qualifications as well.
So, year three? With rain chances every day? With a new car that has had only one full race weekend (without weather) of practice? DERPfest: Long Beach was just that from the first turn of the first lap to the last turn of the last lap. Take that, multiply by two, add water, hail and a fire tornado and you'll get Sao Paulo 2012.
No matter how DERPtacular the race will turn out to be (Dallara is going to make some COIN this week), it will pale in comparison to the (remaining) Lotus teams who have to make due with such a power disadvantage with such a long straightaway that's 0.9 miles long. That means there would be enough time going down that straight for Bourdais to phone home and make arrangements for Le Mans, Simona to also use the phone (but her arrangements would be for finding another IndyCar team) and Legge to sing the entire score from the HMS Pinafore. (I promise that will be my last Simpsons reference for a while...)
Why did I become a Simona fan...
Why couldn't I have picked Will Power, who is going to win this weekend (AGAIN)?
(Race weekend schedule AND Pre-Race Snack of the Week after the jump)
Lotus gamble becomes scramble for desperate teams
by Tony Johns on Apr 25, 2012 6:37 PM EDT
in Blog Posts
It seemed too good to be true at the time - three engine manufacturers after years of Honda exclusivity.
As it turns out, it was too good to be true, especially for the poor folks who were (and, in a couple of instances, still are) saddled with the Judd-built Lotus engine.
The thrill of the black-and-gold and green-and-gold on the IZOD IndyCar Series grid has long since vanished in the harsh light of a motor that looks only a step above Fred Flintstone's feet in terms of torque and overall power. We didn't even know how poor the engine was until a couple of races into the season because none of the Lotus teams seemed to be able to get a balky set of ECUs to play nicely with the powerplants.
It got bad enough that two Lotus teams - Dreyer and Reinbold Racing and Bryan Herta Autosport - have jumped ship. The nightmare scenario of being certain also-rans at the Indianapolis 500 led them to leap off a philosophical cliff and hope they learned to fly with another manufacturer before they hit the ground.
The Paddock Pulse: April 25 Edition
by Tony Johns on Apr 25, 2012 11:00 AM EDT
in Paddock Pulse
ARE YOU READY TO SAMBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA???
Okay, that didn't work as well as I had hoped to get you psyched up for this week's Paddock Pulse, but HEY AT LEAST I TRIED DAMMIT.
You SHOULD be excited about this week's Pulse because it features all sorts of good stuff, including the triumphant return of Simba, Mark Wilkinson pondering the end times, and a blog so lengthy from the Dalb-meister that an obscure sect of Viking descendants living on the outskirts of Toledo, Ohio, have adopted it as their village's epic poem.
That's just not something you can find in other sports - hell, the best football can do is Deion Sanders live-tweeting his kids' gradual transformation into Jerry Springer guests.
Hit the jump and be enthralled.
INDYCAR: Power Rankings (Brazil)
by fleshwound_NPG on Apr 22, 2012 8:01 PM EDT
Turbos. Screaming cars. Passing at Long Beach. Passing when you least suspect it. Road-course races worth watching. Rahals bitching at Andrettis. Andrettis bitching at Rahals. Engine politics. Illmor engines owning the series. Judd engines getting owned. Massive race-day crowds. Ganassi looking semi-useless.
Are we in the right decade? The only thing that's missing are CART badges on the roll-hoop instead of IZOD IndyCar badges on the airboxes. Okay, two extra cylinders in the engine bay as well.
Enough with the reminiscing, lets get back to the future into 2012. Will Power is if anything BETTER than ever. He doesn't even need to win pole positions to bring forth vengeful ownage. I think we need to adopt two new rules for IndyCar going forward:
- Will Power must start no higher than row 5 of a road-course event.
- Tony Kanaan must start no higher than row 5 of an oval event.
Also placing cameras on said cars would dramatically increase the quality of the broadcast (I'm looking at you, ABC).
So it's rather obvious who leads the Power Rankings this week. However how did everybody else do and where should they go? Last Friday I went all Simpsons-y on you and none of you really bitched, so lets do it again. This time to help me in analyising the field I'll be using...
...RALPH WIGGUM QUOTES.
(This week's Power Rankings after the jump..."My cat's name is Mittens!!!")
The Paddock Pulse: April 18 Edition
by Tony Johns on Apr 18, 2012 1:20 PM EDT
in Paddock Pulse
Early this week, we were treated to the somewhat unbelievable sight on Twitter of Mario Andretti calling out Graham Rahal for dissing the Andretti family name to the Associated Press.
Now, I can't stress this enough - Mario Andretti is at an age where most of his contemporaries set cheese out to feed their computer mouse, and yet the guy laid down the Twitter smackdown with the aplomb of a basement-dwelling teenager. That deserves respect. Then again, he IS one of the greatest racecar drivers of all time.
Graham, for his part, seemed surprised at the callout, which isn't too big of a shock because Graham is only 26 and the days when the Associated Press was considered the capo di tutti capi of the media world are as far behind us as those when everyone got their news from actual newspapers. So he could be forgiven, maybe, for thinking that his dropping a verbal assloaf on the Andretti family to the AP might not cause the ruckus it ended up causing.
What does this mean for us? TRAIN WRECK, BABY! That's right - it's rubbernecking glory! Amazingly enough, though, Twitter War III barely resulted in a mention or two in this week's Pulse links, so maybe the blogosphere is maturing a little.
Once you stop laughing at that last line, please hit the jump for this week's links.
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