The best motorsport series in America launches its 2024 season today down in St. Petersburg, Fla., and, no, NASCAR fan, I don't want to hear "Yeah, but we still have more eyeballs," or "Yeah, but what about that finish in Atlanta?"
That finish in Atlanta was great. NASCAR is great, even if it's not what it was before the corporate money rolled in and Dale got killed and Jimmie and Jeff and Dale Jr. 'n' them retired.
And yet ...
And yet, the Blob is an IndyCar guy. The Blob has always been an IndyCar guy. So you're not gonna win this argument no matter how hard you try.
Even, mind you, as I acknowledge that IndyCar has been crapping where it eats for the last going-on-30-years. And continues to do so to this day.
Case in point: St. Pete this weekend.
Down there today, defending Indianapolis 500 winner Josef Newgarden sits on the pole and Felix Rosenqvist sits next to him, and not far behind them sit Pato O'Ward and Colton Herta and Romain Grosjean and Marcus Ericsson. That's five different teams represented in the top six spots on the grid, from Penske to Andretti to McLaren to relative non-powers like Meyer Shank (Rosenqvist) and Juncos Hollinger (Grosjean).
Lurking a bit further back, meanwhile, are Alex Palou and Scott McLaughlin and the grand old men of IndyCar, Scott Dixon and Will Power.
The sport is healthy, in other words. It's as healthy and competitive as it's been since Tony George and CART staged their big greedfest showdown and blew it up 28 years ago. There's more talent on the grid now, much of it still young, than there's been since the early 1990s.
So why is everyone coming into the weekend pissing and moaning?
Michael Andretti started it off by complaining that the Penske conglomerate, which owns the series, wasn't spending the money to properly promote it, and if Roger Penske wasn't willing to do so he should sell the series. Juncos Hollinger co-owner Brad Hollinger then backed Michael's play, favorably comparing IndyCar's competitive product with Formula One's Max Verstappen/Red Bull Tournament of Roses parade.
"We have by far the best product, the racing is spectacular," Hollinger said in an Associated Press piece. "It's phenomenal. Just compare it to what's going on literally right now in Saudi Arabia (where Verstappen and Sergio Perez made it two 1-2 finishes in a row for Red Bull to start the F1 season) ..."
"Here you can have 15 to 20 guys fighting for the top position," Hollinger went on. "But the way it is packaged and promoted needs to be dramatically enhanced. And the way to do that is to get more money into the program."
None of this is new, of course, and predates Penske's ownership by years. IndyCar's marketing of IndyCar has been ham-handed since the Split, lowlighted by the time it tried to cash in on Danica Mania by making Danica Patrick, a one-time career IndyCar winner, the face of the sport.
It was hugely unfair to Patrick, and served only to alienate everyone else in IndyCar. Now everyone's pissed off again -- and once more it adds up to IndyCar not being able to get out of its own way.
That's because, while Andretti and Hollinger and whoever else might have a legit point about Penske's handling of the series, this weekend was not the time to bring it up. This weekend should have been about celebrating what IndyCar is, not griping about what it isn't. Yet the very people dinging the series leadership for not promoting the product better chose opening weekend to ... not promote the product better.
Instead they've spent their time publicly running it down, or at least running the leadership down. And this when, according to Penske Entertainment, merch sales are up 30 percent and attendance for St. Pete is expected to be the largest ever.
To be sure, there's a hint of self-satisfaction in that, and it perhaps lends credence to the criticism that the current leadership is a tad complacent. But how cotton-headed do you have to be to choose now to pick that fight?
Or to put it another way: Does IndyCar always have to IndyCar?
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