Brickyard woes go beyond IMS
INDIANAPOLIS — Indianapolis Motor Speedway President Doug Boles compared his team’s task of revitalizing NASCAR’s Brickyard 400 to a race car crew that needs to make wholesale, overnight changes in hopes of finding race day pace.
Problem is, they simply aren’t equipped with the tools they need to make this thing the speed demon it was more than a decade ago. The car has problems that can be addressed, sure, but what I suspect Boles and his crew know is, that when they go back to the garage, the big problems aren’t with the car. They’re with the manufacturer.
That hasn’t stopped them from vigorously attacking their vehicle to find a mph or two here and there. They’re throw everything they can at it. Bigname concerts and date changes. Dirttrack races and hauler parades. Citywide promotional events and increased fan interaction with drivers. They’ve been gearing up for this fight for a while, and they are giving it everything they’ve got.
But when the green flag flies on Sunday, it won’t be enough. And it’s not their fault. These are some of the best in the business. Hulman & Co., which owns IMS, CEO Mark Miles and Senior Vice President Allison Melangton helped put on a much-praised Super Bowl in Indianapolis. They, along with Boles and his team, restored the Indianapolis 500 to its previous glory.
These people know what they’re doing. And everything they are doing, everything they’ve done is what keeps the Brickyard’s attendance respectable. No, it doesn’t look pretty, but that’s only because of the sprawling kingdom that is The Racing Capital of the World. There’s no way to mask that there are 35,000 fans sitting in 234,000-plus seats.
Yet knowing that, Boles and his team don’t relent. They continue to call Indianapolis 500 ticket-holders to see if they can entice them to come out to the Brickyard with discounted rates. They continue to put in 10-, 12-, 14-hour days. It’s a valiant effort but the Brickyard’s problems are bigger than IMS. They are bigger than Indianapolis. They are NASCAR’s problems.
For one, NASCAR racing at IMS hasn’t been competitive or compelling for years — with the possible exception of last year’s late chaos — making it easy for fans to ignore it. Kyle Busch ran away the 2015 and ‘16 races and nearly turned 2017 into a snoozer, too. The AllStar Package the Xfinity Series experimented with last year looked to be a possible solution, but NASCAR put the kibosh on that for now.
Second, the sport isn’t in a good place right now. Its once substantial fan base is dwindling, and it seems like any big news that come out of NASCARland these days is bad news.
In the past couple of months alone, NASCAR’s attendance numbers and TV viewership have plummeted; its chairman, Brian France, was arrested on a charge of riving while intoxicated; and on Tuesday, the reigning championship team, Furniture Row Racing, announced it was shuttering its doors due to a lack of funding, illustrating just how costly it is for teams to remain competitive. Earlier this year, Roger Penske revealed while speaking with members of the media that it costs him three-times the budget to run one competitive NASCAR Cup Series car as it does to field his entire three-car IndyCar operation.
Meanwhile, the icons fans grew up watching are disappearing. Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Carl Edwards and Danica Patrick have hung up their fire suits and others are joining them (Elliott Sadler and Kasey Kahne have announced their retirements this year).
Those are the bankable legends NASCAR used to depend on, and now, most of them are gone. And while its young talent pool runs deep, no one has emerged as a hero for a new generation of fans.