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5 road courses (NOLA Motorsports, Barber, the horrible Indianapolis infield thing, Mid Ohio, Sonoma)
6 ovals
5 street course (one a double)
Fortunately only one double (Belle Isle), wasn't fond of those the year they were introduced. Too many ovals and street courses in the season for me - the street courses tend to be crash fests and I don't watch motorsports for the crashes. I wouldn't watch F1 street courses, either, but I tend to be more invested in the teams and drivers. Monaco is my LEAST favorite F1 race.
Also not fond of the 4 driver teams - 16 of potentially 28 drivers belong to the big 4 cars teams.
Not enough Ovals!!!
And not enough American Drivers. the Series had a better schedule 7 or 8 years ago.
Couldn't care less about the drivers' nationality, as long as they are reasonably competitive and the racing is good. I feel they have a decent product in this regard. They need to make a dent in lower series again, have the best ladder to pro racing like in the good old days... not sure there's an easy path... but with that in place they should be able to recruit a lot more Americans.
6 ovals is a decent number, but yeah, given the series' heritage, half ovals - half something else would make more sense.
They need to do something about the calendar too, April to August keeps the series out of the conversation for way too long.
So I watched the broadcast of this weekend's race in New Orleans and it was quite possibly the biggest farce I've ever witnessed. Someone's head needs to roll because the track crew was TERRIBLE. It took them 6 laps to clean up Jack Hawksworth's wreck and another 7 to get Sage Karam's car out of the grass. Over half the race was run under yellow and the time limit was hit before the 50 lap mark. Pathetic.
So I watched the broadcast of this weekend's race in New Orleans and it was quite possibly the biggest farce I've ever witnessed............
It was unbelievably bad. Not only the cleanup, but the driving. Luckily I watched a recording and was able to fast forward through the full course yellows. I read where just over thirty minutes of the laps were green flag - the rest were yellow.
Why do all local incidents on road courses result in full course yellows? It was even that way in the CART days.
Last year I watched a Indycar street race, I can't remember which city. I thought that was a farce. It took 20 or 30 laps of FCY to get a restart because the drivers kept on immediately crashing into each other or all by themselves.
the Louisiana race is one of the worst ever. And Time Races should be a No No. its not sports car racing. Just get rid of the long TV intros. Must have been less than 8,000 people there. Its shame the schedule can't be more like 2008.
I was always an Indy car fan until I got tired of small fields and boring races.
Indy is still the greatest spectacle in racing so who gets the credit for that.
Perhaps Indy should only have one race a year instead of a series of non events.
That's pretty much where the "sport" is headed. There is so little to enjoy for any of the fans of open wheel racing at this level that they are turning away and spending their dollars elsewhere. The at-track audiences are small, and the TV audience doesn't even move the meter any longer.
The 500 might survive for a few more years, or as a once a year stand alone event. The rest of the schedule is a bunch of contrived events with contrived cars. The "racing" is long since gone out of it.
The fans know it, the sponsors know it, and the promoters know it. Without each of those groups supporting the product, it has no chance of long term survival.
I'm a little concerned that IndyCar may be in over their heads when it comes to the new aero kits on superspeedways. There have been two spectacular blowovers at Indy in the past two days. Helio and Josef Newgarden both got significantly airborne when their cars spun out and rolled backward at high speeds. I can't recall ever seeing an IndyCar chassis do that before and believe the aero kits are the culprit.
Indy car was largely one race and a few smaller races in past. Never got to big time otherwise because poorly run business wise. Mean while NASCAR was samesmall time that grew to big time during same period.
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