Even before the race is run, Robin Miller of SpeedTV suggests for Fox Sports on the MSN home page eight ways to ‘fix’ the Indy 500.
He discusses the purse, the cars (both their boring single-sourced body design and their equally boring single-sourced engines), practice day formats, other driver/owner incentives, the date of the race and the race’s preliminary events. His piece makes good reading, and I commend it to anyone interested in open wheel racing. But the big Gap in the story is Miller’s strange silence on the very best way to rapidly “fix” the historic event. Change owners.
For all his so-called business acumen Tony George has too often done the short-term right thing for his pocketbook and the long-term wrong thing for racing. In the mid 90’s instead of working from the inside with CART, he chose to go into competition with them and formed IRL – all because he didn’t like road races. Thus weakened, eventually CART failed.
So what does George end up doing a decade later? Builds a ticky-tacky road course in the infield at IMS. Meanwhile, events he set in motion after he took over the helm of his family-owned speedway have whittled away at the international fan interest. The last few years the annual event has become b-o-r-i-n-g, so much so that the ‘big story’ this year is that maybe this will be the first year a woman wins! Big deal.
For many years women have been quite capable of outracing men. Gender plays virtually no role when the RPM’s are red-lined. The old saying, “Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?” holds true no matter what chromosomes are behind the wheel. The only reason this is news in 2007 is because everything else about the race is old news – and boring and – oh, I don’t know, maybe characterless, colorless, commonplace, drab, drudging, dull, humdrum, insipid, interminable, monotonous, repetitious, routine, stale, stuffy, tame, tedious, tiresome, tiring, trite, unexciting, unvaried, vapid, wearisome, well-worn, and uninteresting might be the best way to put it.
But I could be wrong. Except, when the noise of 33 finely tuned mechanical devices spinning as fast as they are capable of, all coming thundering down the front straightaway, each with umpteen thousand mini-explosions going off in their ‘innards’ every second or so, it should be an exciting moment – and maybe even a significant moment for some. The last few years, it hasn’t.
Unfortunately, in the past 18 years Tony George has frittered away his family’s business and good will, leaving the Indy 500 a prime example on how NOT to run an annual racing event.
Sad.
