IndyCow - Part II - One Trick Pony
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One trick is all that horse can do
He does one trick only
It's the principal source of his revenue..."
- Paul Simon -
by Rick Carlton - Motorsports Opinion
To state my position plainly, I love Indycar and have been a fan, professional journalist and marketing and press services consultant in and around the series since my Dad first took me to the 500 in 1964. Years later, when I had an opportunity to write about open-wheel for On-Track my focus was driven by an interest in the American series first each year, even though there was a lot more technical trickery going on in F1. Nonetheless, there were always multiple chassis manufacturers in the series (including Lola, Reynard, Gurney Eagle and Penske), and three, and sometimes four engine manufacturers (Ford-Cosworth, Honda, Chevrolet and Toyota) competing, so there was always something to write about during the greening-up of each year's cars, and little bits of new information in the context of each engine manufacturer as well. Mainly, however, when the series was at full song, hard-nosed competition and real team innovation happened weekly.
However, at the mid-point of the 1995 season, a festering multiple-year business argument for control of American open-wheel between Tony George and the CART Board blew up in everyone's faces, and in 1996 there were two competing open-wheel series - the CART PPG IndyCar World Championship and the Indy Racing League Series. Although there was enough real and juvenile irritation to go around, Mr. George's primary disaffection lay somewhere between "You CART guys have been mean to me and I'm picking my ball up and going home," and a more business-like rationale based on his fears about the potential marginalization of his family-owned Memorial Day evolution.
Meanwhile, the CART people looked at the series' business value differently, based on a belief that a better revenue stream could be garnered by creating IndyCar as an extended international racing entertainment attraction, even though the then ACCUS/FIA sanctioning Concorde, enjoined the series from operating head-to-head with FIA's F1 World Championship. In the end neither CART's team owners nor George were willing to budge from their respective business positions. The impasse triggered a negative and active audience/sponsor/commercial partner migration away from the two American open-wheel series and toward various other forms of professional racing, or many fans simply gave up entirely and decided to take up other entertainment pursuits. These impacts destroyed everything that was good about American open-wheel racing between '96 and today, and regardless of contrary suggestions offered by the IRL Kool-Aid Set, once the fans "left the building" they have never returned whether measured by yearly attendance, or similar-period TV ratings.
Recently, however, things got much more difficult when sources indicated that Tony George's Mother Mari Hulman-George, Chairman of Hulman Co, and the family's final financial decision-maker, began to look at limiting various team equipment support programs, favoring instead a new philosophy based on forcing the "little birds to fly" on their own, or one way or the other. This was not unexpected, since the family had apparently been propping up teams for some years and its Board was looking for a more reasonable break-even proposition.
The opportunity appeared when ChampCar (the successor to CART) decided to fold up its tent in February 2008, and with series unification a Hoosier fait acompli, and various marquee teams/drivers beginning to return to the IRL fold, the folks in Speedway experienced a collective sigh of relief. Subsequently, in January 2010, the family voted the League's marketing and business development team, followed by CEO Tony George off the island. Those events were then followed by the arrival of former Professional Bull Riding Association (PBRA) senior executive Randy Bernard who then became the new League CEO, in addition to a new cadre of hard-ball, bean-counting operating executives, thereby setting the scene for what was about to happen next.
In rhetorical terms then, what do you suppose a brand-new senior executive does with a national motorsports property that offers a one-track business plan, weak marketing and sales, only one major commercial partner (IZOD) and a seriously damaged brand? Along with that, add a bottom-tier network television package offering predictable and boring TV, owned by the same people who own the League, while begging disaffected fans to pay attention again, and subjectively compete against the notion of NASCAR as the only "serious" American auto racing series.
Predictably, Bernard did what he had to do, which was focus his business energy and available revenue on trying to sell anything he could, and continue to try to polish up the apple he had in hand - but not take the time to kick Brian Barnhardt in his "rocket science," to drive the ICONIC committee and generate a new car development environment that encouraged competition, not more of the same. After all, open-wheel is supposed to be about world-class competition, and a good part of the historic and exotic attraction of the series comes from the "bleeding edge" quality of the cars themselves. So when the Bernard/Barnhardt confab trotted out a new car that offered same-same performance at best, pro forma technical innovation, and in general more Vanilla than Green Hornet Pistachio, why would anyone be driven to pay good money to sit in the stands at Newton Iowa on a humid Sunday afternoon, or pick up the remote and jump from the NFL Channel to Indycar On Versus?
I am not naive, and simply saying "old becomes new again" doesn't mean anything in business, and sometimes you have to simply "get 'R done" to survive. To be fair, there is an intrinsic reasonableness for limiting the League's costs by offering nothing more than another "One Trick Pony" that can be claimed as a next-gen technical progression, without actually doing much. However, after thinking about it, I reject this notion since over the years, and for one reason or another, the League slowly and deliberately moved its sporting philosophies away from risk-management and toward risk-aversion - which has permeated the series throughout, while at the same time flying in the face of the attraction of open-wheel racing in the first place.
So here's a simple and straightforward pro-competitive fan-attractive proposal. How about the League gets out of the business of saying who can race what, simply sets out a clear set of forward leaning technical rules, then let the chassis manufacturers decide whether they do, or do not want to race on Sunday? After all, when did any professional motorsports sanctioning body give up the idea of encouraging multiple world-class engineering firms to compete head-to-head. Certainly not NASCAR, Grand Am, ALMS or SCCA Pro Racing (and lets not even talk about F1).
Given conversations I've had with various builders over the last four or five months, and given their interest in being part of the "new" IndyCar during the run up to the ICONIC "decision," it would seem that Lola Cars, Swift, BAT, The Lawn Dart Consortium and Dallara were serious about competing as a group in 2012. However, that option was not laid on the table. And, if anyone believes that the League's announcement was based on a legitimate committee "vote" based on keeping things the same, while making Indycar even less viable as a future entertainment value, is in dire need of an intervention of some kind. As Shakespere opined, "...Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," however methinks the dead fish smell is really coming from offices and conference rooms on 16th street.
In the next part, we'll talk about what we could have seen.....