Logan has had soooo many quali laps deleted this year. Clearly is just trying too hard.
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Pourchaire being F2 champion is great, but I can’t help but feeling disappointed by his season. Everyone else in the top 5 was more impressive than him this year
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I really can’t tell if you are trolling or serious sometimes. You’re talking about subjectives opinions as if they were facts. I knowing you really like karting above all else, but this a pretty shallow view of Motorsports.
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No serious, and the initial post was about marketing. I don’t mince my words. Often in motorsport people try to shy away from these kind of things. Behind the scenes this is what will be being said.
The reality is you have several drivers in IndyCar who would drop it in seconds to get a drive in F1. That immediately undermines it (and this effects all non-F1 motorsport, even MotoGP oddly enough).
It’s very difficult to market a series as something worthwhile and high-value if the top drivers are trying to position themselves in an F1 context. It is club racing on steroids. Spec-chassis racing is always lower stakes and something that really should be left for the club-racer, not professional motorsport competition. If you cant have high-stakes racing, and this is the core of any marketing strategy, then you’ve got problems. IndyCar can’t move away from its current format because its financially very weak, I know, but that will make it extremely hard to market. It has the Indy500, and that pretty much is what the whole series rests upon.
The same marketing teams promoted Avengers Infinity War & The Marvels. Marketing can only do so much when you don’t have meaning.
I guess my question is… what makes a particular type of racing meaningful.
Other than the first and last few laps, I literally was falling asleep.
I do think Checo’s 5 second penalty was a wrong call, but overall another unimpressive qual and thus race for him. Leclerc smartly tried at the end to try and salvage some points for the team, but it wasn’t to be.
So why is Checo safe for 2024? This is certainly a case of, it’s not the driver it’s the car that allowed him to get second place in the driver championship. Albon was certainly more impressive from a driver’s view this year, dragging Williams up to 7th.
I believe F1 should have ballot racing.
Not reverse grids, absolute random grids.
The race means nothing when the fastest qualifying car starts first and everyone else just follows them around the track.
I’m a little in favour of cost caps, but I’m more in favour of even distribution of funds, you want 18 or whatever cars racing wheel to wheel, stop giving the top teams so much of a share of the money that they leave the smaller teams in the dust.
A culmination of these factors.
- The amount of emotional investment each fan has for their team
- The number of people who engage with a sport
- Cultural and historical heritage
- The effort required to build each car
- The desire of each driver to compete within that competition.
- Something being ‘proven’
I have a lot of problems with F1, but it ticks more ‘meaning’ boxes than any other competition. It means more to more people because of them.
IndyCar has one of those boxes now and that’s the Indy500. Everything else it’s lacking. It doesn’t have a large fan base, and that fan base is generally not heavily invested in any particular team, this is partly due to the ‘spec’ nature of the chassis. The teams are staffed with far less people. The drivers quite clearly would rather be somewhere else if the opportunity arises.
You can’t divorce marketing the from the product. A marketer will ask “where’s the story, where’s the meaning?”, they will see the story with IndyCar is actually F1. The commentators for some mad reason will mention F1 during the races (which I think is mad). They derive value from F1. “Hey, look an F1 driver has entered IndyCar. Hey McLaren makes F1 cars” etc…
You don’t want 18 cars races wheel to wheel. You want strong narratives, real competition. That means you need clear performance differentiation. F1 only needs two teams going at it for a legendary season. If it becomes random racing you soon start to lose people, a bit like IndyCar or BTCC which can often feel like random result generators.
Indy 2023
Alex Palou 5 wins
Josef Newgarden 4 wins
Scott Dixon 3 wins
Kyle Kirkwood 2 wins
Roughly 82% of this years races were won by roughly 15% of the field. That does not say random number generator to me. It says good competition
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I’d like to see a mix & match of F1 & Indy car racers… Max, Lewis, Lando racing in a spec Indy car…
I said often, but not always. It’s not good competition, in my view. 2022 had 9 different winners as did 2021. Or put another way. Dallara has won every race. So it’s either a little bit random, or it’s hyper predictable. Either way, it lacks meaning because of it.
There’s less competition if the cars are the same. Every component, well almost, on an F1 car is an area for development, for competition. Right now we have departments at F1 teams making fuel lines that are in direct competition with each other. I know IndyCar has damper development, but generally speaking is bereft of competition.
It isn’t really open for debate that IndyCar as an tiny viewership globally compared to F1 and a fraction of the column inches. The racing is somewhat inconsequential. To route back to the marketing thing. It’s incredibly difficult to market IndyCar beyond where it’s at because it’s fundamentally lower stakes. it’s easy to attack marketing, but it’s an uphill battle with Indy.
Its all about perception and what YOU the viewer or attendee value.
F1 is living off the past and the reputation formed as the pinnacle of motorsport and innovation. The on track product sucks. Zero race day strategy involved, and there hasn’t been real passing in quite some time. Every race is the same tire strategy for almost every team…snoozer… Mistakes and crazy weather are all that make the races interesting. I still watch, my son (who races) does not any more. Give them time and they will evolve into spec car racers like the rest, all in the name of cost control.
Indycar and even Nascar used to all pursue innovation and drivers frequently moved between them all. Nascar was the first to move away from innovation and clearly the least alike and had the least crossover. Modern Nascar has wandered so far from its roots in the pursuit to capture fanbase that it has lost what made it unique. The on track product is pretty boring, the cars can no longer relate to the consumer, and the drivers are all whitewashed corporate poster boys with no character.
Indycar used to have much more, but eventually had 2 ways of thought and foolishly split. One was road courses and international drivers and big budgets, one was spec cars all ovals and Indy 500. The model holding Indy won out despite being the inferior product. Fast forward and they now have road courses and ovals with essentially spec cars. The on track product is some great racing, but the lack of team/car identity does hurt them.
F1 gets mentioned all the time in Indy coverage because they have a long time F1 commentator now covering the races. He lost his job when the F1 monopoly feed switched to ESPN. Can’t really call it the ESPN broadcast, its just the ESPN commentators, they have zero control on what the video feed is.
Having been to multiple Indy, F1, Nascar, NHRA, and Super Cross events I think the most accessible to fans of all of them is NHRA and the most exciting on track product is Super Cross. I still watch them all, and they all have pros and cons. I can say, I will not fork over the $$ for another in person F1 race, but all of the others I will.
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Red Bull’s innovative dynamic contact patch reduction system. 
Yes, that’s called cultural heritage, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Indycar is almost entirely dependent on one single race each year to remain relevant.
Again, saying things like the races are snooze fest is fine, but those races mean more than every other motorsport on the planet. Good racing is NOT hard to find, meaningful racing is very hard to find. It’s the biggest mistake almost all motorsport series make. They think ‘good close racing’ will bring in fans. It doesn’t. Almost all sports that are successful require on more ‘cultural’ aspects. Football doesn’t rely on good games, it relies upon the cultural aspect of the sport that draws locals to support their local team. It speaks more to tribal aspects of humans, than of the game itself. Football happens to be a relatively well-balanced sport, and this combining with tribalism is a potent mix.
Bare in mind I don’t spend money going to watch F1, and I am not spending money to get TV coverage either. I am have a lot of problems with it, but it’s so far ahead of every other motorsport I don’t think people really appreciate that.
To go back to the ‘meaning’ thing. We can take TJ’s experience on this very forum. He was racing for Best Kart at SKUSA as part of their development effort. It immediately yielded interaction and interest at a much deeper level from the forum than had he just rocked up with a TonyKart. Nothing about the race changes. Same venue, same karts, same place, same time. What’s different is the ‘meaning’ the race had for us forum members. Suddenly there’s more interest, more risk, more reward.
Another example is Marc Marquez going to Ducati. MotoGP hasn’t changed but 2024 suddenly feels like it means a lot more.
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So the season is over, I know the drivers don’t like the increase in the number of race weekends but I love it:). Not loving the sprints though. I was a skeptic of Vegas but will freely admit the race was good, way better than expected. Glamour and glitz not my thing🤷🏻♂️
Looking forward to next year as far as I’m aware there will be no driver changes. Only one somewhat up in the air is Logan Sargeant although I think it’s only a matter of time before he is confirmed for 2024. I really was willing him to do well but it just didn’t happen. I would not retain him this year personally. I think Williams need another experienced driver in the other seat although not sure who that would be. Roll on 2024.
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Frankly I’m ok with f1 doing what it does. One day they will be unpleasantly surprised when the leopard eats their face. Promote douchily and prepare to get douched when public opinion shifts away from the plastic glamour of vapid trend and celebrity chasing.
They have done great stuff though… the guy who announces the drivers… that sort of stuff. Really fun. I think they definitely got this partially correct.
If f1 were to cease to exist, that would suck for us regular car drivers as we seem to benefit from their tech down the line (see Mercedes s-class for example).
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I honestly think it’s the people that are more “into the racing” (if that makes any sense) that will have their faces eaten. Cynic in me suspects that F1\liberty will continue to be the media entity that it is and double down on it.
We can say a LOT of unkind things about Ecclestone, but at least he seemed to be all about BOTH making a ***k ton of money and keeping some semblance of racing focus.
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Yah I was thinking about that the other day… the devil you know… he very much loved f1(I assume he must have since he was the brilliant architect of its last leg)… and he really tried.
In retrospect, it could have been worse, as we are now seeing.