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Category: Motorsports

Don't blame Goodyear for the empty seats next year

A lot of blame is being tossed around for what went wrong at Indianapolis. NASCAR and Goodyear both have issued apologies and vowed to never wreck another race by coming to a track so utterly unprepared.

It seems impossible that the sole tire supplier to a top-level professional motor sports series could have gotten it so horribly wrong. A third of the race was run under caution.

What happened with the tires at the Brickyard 400 Sunday is the equivalent of the NFL's football supplier suddenly, on a mid-season Sunday, providing footballs that fall apart.

It wasn't like the farce Michelin created at Indy's 2005 U.S. Grand Prix. At least some of the Formula One field was on Bridgestones, however racing in 30 mile segments was better than watching the top stars park their cars because they were afraid of running their tires down to the cords like the test of courage NASCAR put its stars through on Sunday.

But before I heard Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Joie Chitwood complain about having to tempt disappointed fans back next year -- I noticed all the empty seats. Thousands and thousands of fanny-wide pieces of uncovered shiny aluminum were plain to see on TV.

That's right Joie, they failed to show up in droves before the green flag dropped. And that's a bigger problem for NASCAR and its struggling speedways than Goodyear's serious and dangerous brain fade last Sunday.

Chitwood admitted to the Indianapolis Star that attendance was "off a tick." After fabricating the hype and living off the speedway's fading legend through 12 poisonous years of attendance-killing, self-mutilating warfare between the Indy Racing League and what was left of CART, I guess stretching the truth comes easy down in Indy. And I see the hometown newspaper is back to sucking up the chamber of commerce line by estimating attendance at 225,000.

After decades of secrecy about Indy attendance figures and wild guesses as high as 500,000, the Indianapolis Star spent six months in 2004 (and probably a lot of intern lunch hours) counting all 257,325 permanent seats. Adding in the infield mounds and camping and workers and journalists, the total possible attendance, according to The Star is 267,925.

So, even by Chitwood's estimate, he was short of a sellout by 42,925 tickets. In Indianapolis, being "off a tick" is a 16 percent downturn or the equivalent of kissing off a crowd slightly larger than a Comerica Park sellout.

It's the economy, stupid!

We are staying home, avoiding the expense of tickets, concession food and, oh yeah, gasoline. But we are watching our sport on TV in record numbers. ESPN's coverage of the Brickyard -- as bad as it was, had the second best cable television draw last weekend with 6.67 million viewers, according to Nielsen. It was ESPN's most watched motor race, ever.

Where do we rank with other entertainment? TNT's The Closer drew and amazing 7.1 million viewers. The NASCAR race was followed by Disney's The Best of Hannah and Miley. The next best weekend sports draw was fake wrestling. ESPN's major league baseball game between the Red Sox and Yankees was a distant 13th with a 2.8 rating to NASCAR's 4.3.

This is going to come as a shock to the people who make decisions, but golf didn't even crack the top 20. Spongebob Squarepants did though.

Michigan International Speedway is investing in billboards and television advertising for its Aug. 16 and 17 NASCAR events like I've never seen before. There were a lot of empty seats in June, but it's a sign of our times.

Around here, we've had more proof than most of this life changing event our country is facing. Even the Detroit Lions are advertising season tickets. As bad as they are, the Lions never had trouble selling season tickets because, let's face it, you get to see one real NFL team every time the Lions play. And we liked the stadiums. The Silverdome and Ford Field both are cool. Now, even that isn't enough.

I get tired of hearing pretender NASCAR fans complain about how boring the races have become. Come on, it's an endurance race. We used to be lucky to have two cars on the lead lap, now that number often is 40 or more. And just like with a basketball game, it's about pacing, keeping the score close and finishing strong. Still, a 3 1/2 hour long race is a lot easier to take when it's competitive, so it's unfortunate NASCAR's next stop this weekend is Pocono -- where the cars tend to get spread out.

Meanwhile, shame on Goodyear for Sunday's display of incompetence.

Not only did you fail to do your homework, you took a pratfall on one of the sport's biggest stages. Tony Stewart warned you -- very clearly -- in March about how far off you were on making tires for the new car. It seems that by now, four months later you'd get the point that this car is heavier. Or is this still about trying to cheap out and make one tire every weekend for all three series; Cup, Nationwide and Trucks?

Despite building a new tire for a new car, Goodyear did only one test at Indy in April under conditions that wouldn't likely be the same as July. Goodyear also knew that few of the teams test at Indy because a test there doesn't help at other tracks. Now, you've got Bridgestone salivating at a chance to break into NASCAR's exclusive tire provider deal. What ever happened to the open market philosophy espoused by the majority of NASCAR's political party affiliates?

NASCAR's dilemma over testing is no small matter. Testing costs money and as the sponsors and crowds dry up in this recession (I'm from Detroit, I dare to say it) NASCAR must find ways to reduce team and track expenses.

So here's my solution.

Eliminate all testing. It only advantages the rich teams anyway. Show up with your spec-race car, pass inspection and figure it out at the track in the two half hour practice sessions. NASCAR and Goodyear should operate a jointly funded testing program that gathers real data at every NASCAR track to avoid the unbelievable guessing on safety that happened Sunday and let the teams do the guessing on performance. Performance data from the tests would be shared equally by NASCAR and Goodyear with all competitors and NASCAR would get even greater control over mandated shocks, springs, wing angles and gear ratios.