Quote:
Originally Posted by Teretonga
Read the article.
It gives the sponsorship revenues for both CART, IRL and NASCAR in general and how each organisation tackled the loss of tobabcco money. It's the way the respective organiations organised themselves and their repective series, who they targeted for commercial support and what the consequences were for each of them.
It makes sense and has some very good points the IRL could learn from. Whatever the past, you need to learn the lessons from past events if you are going to be successful in the future. Open wheel in the US has a big mountain to climb but Everest is big and people climb that every year .simply for the challenge.
Open wheel has a future if the right decisions are made but you will not reurn to the haylacon days of the 80's/90's overnight.
Secondly its not about blame. Its about learning what not to do and not repeating mistakes, neither your own past mistakes nor anyone elses.
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I don't see a link anywhere.
If it's trying to make the case the IRL was uniquely dependent on tobacco money, so the loss of tobacco money forced decline, that's a pretty tough argument to make. Remember the Winston Cup? It became the Nextel Cup and now the Sprint Cup, and it is now a much bigger deal than it was in the tobacco days. Remember McLaren's sponsor during the great Senna/Prost battles? Those cars became Silver Arrows and continued to be quite competitive. If the IRL was uniquely dependent of tobacco and CART by comparison wasn't, why did K-Mart, Texaco, Shell, Valvoline, Miller, Bud, and all the other household name sponsors leave CART?
The Split. The Split is the only reason American open wheel went down the tube while other motorsports flourished.
So, as far as learning from past mistakes, what is there to learn?
I think what there is to learn is that the sport was at its best when it was run by the people with gasoline running in their veins. There were legions of fans like myself who in the mid to late '80's switched loyalty from F1 to CART as their favorite open wheel series because it was a series they could afford to watch in person from one to several times a year, and could walk the paddock and see cars not much slower than F1 cars up close and personal.
Then, somebody had to strangle the golden goose, so we are back to F1 fans, watching from afar.
The only hope for the future would be the people with gasoline in their veins taking the sport back. Something I hope the Delta Wing group does.
If that happens, I have absolutely no doubt the sport will climb out of the pit it's in. Of course if that happens, the argument will be it was because the economy improved, so that was going to happen anyway (conveniently ignoring the decline of the sport during the go-go mid '00's).