[luke]

Originally Posted by indycool

Times change. People change. Situations change. Electrocuted makes a lot of sense in his post. If you have 25,000 at Cleveland and it looks packed, and 40,000 at Phoenix, and it looks empty because they seat 80,000 at Phoenix, which had the larger attendance?

Phoenix has been at the forefront of change twice. In 1979, Phoenix dumped USAC for CART. In '96, Phoenix dumped CART for IRL. In both cases, Phoenix was "first up" to make the switches. In both cases, attendance dropped slightly for a year or two but regained it quickly.

From Speed

Sure, it's not the only game in town like it was in the '60s and before NASCAR's emergence, but Winston Cup was already pulling in 80,000 in '95 when CART drew 64,000. The question is, where did all those fans go? Many of them were miffed in 1996 when they came to PIR and found Kite, Murphy and Carlson instead of Andretti, Rahal and Unser. Maybe they turned to stock cars or simply tuned out Indy cars.

An optimistic estimate would be 5,000 and, as one member of the media observed, "I had more people at my wedding."

As the irl race at Phoenix doesn't seem to popular, I only wished Champ Car had the 'desert mile' race again.

In 2003 when Fontana was canceled, I believe there was a chance that Phoenix, could take over the race, for that year, due to the fires. (as I think both tracks, are owned by the same company.)