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Category: Motorsports

When racing's royal families play, fans pay

The tracks on the 2009 Indy Racing League schedule announced Wednesday might not be as interesting as the ones that got left off.

And some folks are angry.

Detroit's Belle Isle Grand Prix will be back on Labor Day weekend for a third year, but there's a hole in the schedule on July 19, 2009 that perfectly fits Michigan International Speedway -- and it's not going to happen because Tony George won't allow an IRL race within 4 hours drive of Indianapolis on the same day as his NASCAR Brickyard 400 race.

"I don't know if they ever want to have us again," MIS President Roger Curtis told Mike Pryson of the Jackson Citizen Patriot. "This very well could be the end of open-wheel racing at MIS for the foreseeable future."

And that's a shame. Fans of the big, fast oval in the Irish Hills recreation area near Jackson should have celebrated the track's 40th year of Indy Car racing this month, but we are the victims of politics between America's royal racing families -- the Hulman-George clan that owns Indy and the IRL and the France family that owns NASCAR and Michigan International Speedway.

You see, Tony got put into a bad spot by NASCAR which maximized its profits by selling television rights to multiple networks -- and ESPN wanted to start its season with the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis. So what TV wants, TV gets, and NASCAR moved the date.

The race may have been a competitive and fan disaster with Goodyear's monumental mistake in providing tires that didn't last more than 30 miles. But, ESPN attracted 6.67 million viewers, the largest number of viewers for any ESPN motor sports broadcast, ever.

At the same time, Tony also was getting pushed around by Formula One's dictator-elect-for-life Bernie Eccelstone. I think we can see how Tony got testy. While Eccelstone was telling the world that Indy didn't promote F1 very well, and that F1 really didn't need the United States, the IRL was telling MIS it didn't do a very good job of promoting IRL races, and the track could have a date just a week away from its August NASCAR event or just a week from the September Belle Isle event, just 80 miles away. Forget all the stuff IRL's marketers have said about open-wheel and stock car demographics being two separate groups: MIS couldn't have its long-held traditional date in the middle of July because that would conflict with Indy's NASCAR event.

These were options that Curtis rejected.

Well, the finally unified top American open-wheel series is a hotter property than it was last year at this time. From what I've read, the series officials are exercising their new power. We aren't the only ones upset by the IRL's shift from ovals to more road and street courses.

Representatives of Nashville Superspeedway on Monday sounded a lot like the folks at MIS last summer when they talked about being frustrated in negotiations with IRL officials who appeared to be uninterested in any actual agreements. Nashville's owner, Dover Motorsports Inc., already had a belly-full of the IRL anyway, having previously lost races at two of its other oval tracks, Gateway International Raceway in St. Louis and Dover International Speedway in Delaware.

Track General Manager Cliff Hawks issued this statement: "Regrettably, the IRL has chosen to structure their sanction fees at such a level that we had no choice but to re-evaluate whether they fit into our plan. Regardless, we believe the IRL had no further interest in the middle Tennessee market."

New Hampshire Motor Speedway executive vice president and general manager Jerry Gappens said he didn't want to burn any bridges, but he also was upset about being excluded.

"I think it's a slap in the face to our chairman Bruton Smith and to our company who have been very supportive of the Indy Racing League since its inception. I sat in a meeting and watched Bruton ask them for a race here, which they seemed extremely interested in doing, pending scheduling conflicts with Japan. In addition, in that same meeting, they asked him to host the series finale in Las Vegas, which he agreed to and even offered the speedway and financial support to do it this year. Having attended that meeting in early June, it's hard to believe that neither is on the new schedule."

Eddie Gossage, head of Texas Motor Speedway, which got its IRL date renewed, said the IRL wasn't interested in racing on the oval at Las Vegas, but instead wanted to set up a street course alongside.

"We're all about the big racetrack, not the parking lot course," Gossage said.

The loss of Nashville appeared briefly to offer a solution for MIS, because the July 12 date would have been ideal, but IRL -- which was founded by Tony George with the stated purpose of breaking away from CART to return Indy Car racing to its oval roots -- chose instead to give the date to the street course in Toronto.

"We think it is a good move toward balance," IRL Commercial President Terry Angstadt said Wednesday about someday hoping to have a schedule equally split between ovals and road courses.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie.