AndreaModa wrote:I guess it's more of an American thing but for the uninitiated (like me) it's impossible to follow who is driving for which team because of the different liveries. By the end I had sussed that Kanaan and Dixon were both Ganassi drivers and obviously with broadly the same liveries Power and Montoya were Penske teammates, but certainly for the smaller teams who received less coverage (because the race was effectively Penske vs. Ganassi) I haven't got a clue. It's obviously for sponsorship reasons and as I said, maybe more of a traditional American thing but it would be so much easier if teams ran similar liveries to make it easy for the casual viewer to understand.
In American motorsports, teammates are less of an important thing - you're out for your own team, comprised of the people who work on your car and no others. You might race a teammate easier than anyone else, of course, but you'll never see team orders or anything remotely approaching it.
That said, the car Kanaan drives was once a Target-branded car like Dixon's still is - but naturally with the recession that was unaffordable, especially since IndyCar is a second-rate series in terms of viewership when compared with NASCAR. But even there, sponsors are one-to-a-car, and you'll frequently see a single driver run different liveries for different sponsors for x amount of races because very few companies can even afford a full season anymore, so while I do sympathise with you there - sometimes even I can't tell who is who at a glance - it's just not financially feasible.
The racing, if I'm honest, wasn't that great. It appeared heavily reliant on the pitstop 'cycles' for anyone to make any real progress, though this could of course be down to the track just as much as the cars/drivers. The last few laps were tense though, especially when it appeared Montoya was making inroads into Briscoe. Definitely the best part of the race.
Sonoma isn't great for IndyCar racing to be honest. If you want to see IndyCar's best on a road course, I can highly recommend this year's race from Barber. The oval races might not be to your taste, but if you're interested, Fontana was a very tense and very closely fought race at 200+ mph with at least 4 or 5 cars competing for the lead at any point.
Was there ANYONE watching in the stands at the race itself? I've seen numerous tweets this year about how IndyCar viewing figures on TV in the States are rising steadily which is good news, but my word I couldn't see any significant crowds at the track. Maybe the location isn't great? Either way that needs to be addressed because it can't be good for the premier open wheel series in the US to get what appeared to be such poor crowds at the season finale.
If you think that was bad, you should've seen Fontana. Like only 500 people turned up to that, and no, I'm not exaggerating. You have to realise - spectator attendance in America for motorsports is pretty poor, and for IndyCar, positively dire. Even NASCAR struggles to fill the stands at most racetracks nowadays.
That said, viewing figures on TV have been improving - Sonoma was the highest viewed race IndyCar has ever had on NBCSN - by a good 200k as well.
Also, I've seen this mentioned elsewhere but why is the series ending in August?!
Because Mark Miles is an idiot and thinks that IndyCar is competing with the NFL. No, I don't have a clue either. Thankfully, the series should be ending in mid-September next year if I've heard correctly - couple with an earlier start in March, it'll still be a short season but better than the 5-month farce of a schedule we've had for the past 2 years.
Finally, just how bad are costs and budgets currently in IndyCar? I get the whole need for a spec chassis to save costs and help the smaller guys but for me it cheapens the series to some degree.
IndyCar has been spec-chassis since 2009. They had spec-engines from 2006-2011 as well - not by design, but because only Honda saw any value in supplying engines. Champ Car was spec-engines for the last few years, with spec-chassis soon following.
The reason is pretty simple actually - there's only one third-party chassis manufacturer with the capacity to supply IndyCar, and that's Dallara. Reynard went bust, Lola went bust, Panoz/G-Force pulled out... and the only team that ever was able to build their own chassis' was Penske, and they stopped doing that after a disastrous 1998 and 1999.
The aero kits exist (I think) because people was complaining about things being nothing like the good old days where the cars looked different. Obviously nobody was going to step up to provide a different base chassis, so instead IndyCar got Honda and Chevy to develop their own aero kits. After a few teething problems earlier this year, they seem to be balancing out a bit, but Honda are still at a bit of a disadvantage, and to be honest, I still don't see the point - the cars looked better as the stock DW12. The reason why it has fenders, by the way, is to stop wheels from interlocking and causing horrendous accidents. This tends to happen a lot more often in a series which has very close racing with single-seaters - which IndyCar does.
