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Fair points rustyfan, from a pure racing perspective Monaco is possibly the best street circuit in the world, although the way they've mvoed some of the barriers back in the last couple of years does annoy me, as it makes it easier than it was - the track which should be the ltiamte test of driver rather than car.
The facts electrocuted posted are interesting. Looking a US attendances, the IRL has generally been a lot more successful even when you ignore Indy (which will probably always be the biggest US OW race, no matter which series it's part of; a fact CART wrongly ignored), and its 2004 Milwaukee race got 50% more attendees than ChampCars did in either 2003 or 2004. I'm not sure whether you'd expect the IRL to get more at St Pete's than ChampCars did in 2003 - it's not a brand new race, and any momentum from the first race will've been lost by the lack of a 2004 visit, and there's excitement but also real doubt over the potential quality of IRL street races, but there will be more big names out there than 2 years ago. The 2006 attendance would perhaps be the acid test, as to how many first-timers enjoy it and return.
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