A solution to racing woes
From
www.autoextremist.com The one racing championship the U.S. lacks is the one championship we need the most.
Detroit. This weekend, the Japan GT Championship makes its first appearance on U.S. soil at the California Speedway, and it promises to be an interesting and provocative event. And beginning this week, Speed Channel viewers can get their annual fix of the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters’s championship (DTM) highlighting the 2004 season. And of course there's the sensational Australian V-8 Supercar series, which features the excitement of V-8-powered high-performance cars sponsored by the factories, hammering against each other in exotic race track locales all over Australia. There are several key ingredients that make these road-racing series so compelling, including production-based cars with great sounding, powerful V-8s and direct, enthusiastic, factory support. But the single most critical feature that makes these series a success is that they're all unified, national road-racing series - and they attract focused, national attention from the media and from racing fans. It's exactly this kind of unified and focused national road-racing championship that the U.S. lacks - and it's killing the sport of road racing in this country that we don't have something equivalent to it.
On the one hand, one could argue that we're blessed with several great production-based road-racing series in this country - the Speed World Challenge, the ALMS GT1 and GT championships, the Grand-American championship, and even the Trans-Am (although it's clearly on life support). But I would argue that these series, each with their own set of redeeming qualities, together don't exactly add up to an embarrassment of riches. Rather, they scatter sponsorship and television dollars and fight for fans' attention in a debilitating sequence that's ultimately futile.
Affixing blame in this predicament, though easy to do, is a waste of time - because everybody involved is responsible. Each one of these series' heads think that their series is the one that should exist. And the manufacturers contribute their own negativity to the situation by "dabbling" in these series where and when they see fit to do so, with their overriding motives being a combination of political expediency - and trying to take advantage of a competitive rule set that favors their particular entry. But together, these warring factions, while staking out their turf and controlling their own little fiefdoms, continue to contribute to this perpetual state of neutral that road racing seems to find itself in year after year in this country.
Is there a solution? Yes, there is. As I've pointed out repeatedly, Detroit-based manufacturers are dumping $125 million each, annually, into the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series. The Autoextremist proposal is for each Detroit-based manufacturer to reduce their NASCAR budgets by 25 percent, then contribute that money (any other manufacturer wishing to enter the series would have to contribute an equal amount) to the formation of a new, national, production-based road-racing series that would feature top-ranked pro drivers, entries from U.S. and import manufacturers, and a national television contract that would showcase and highlight the series in "live" broadcasts. I'm sure this solution would immediately infuriate the management of every other current production-based road-racing series in this country, but the fact of the matter is that if we're ever going to see the kind of attention and popularity that the original Can-Am and Trans-Am series garnered for road racing in the late '60s and early '70s, a radical step such as this must be taken.
This basic re-apportioning of the road-racing landscape in this country would require that the Detroit-based manufacturers get together and pool their significant resources in order that a long-term commitment to this new series could be made - and that a stable financial base could be guaranteed for it for years to come.
Is it possible? Absolutely. But it will require genuine vision from the players at the manufacturers involved - and serious resolve too. Because they will have to take a big step back from the NASCAR marketing juggernaut and put down their NASCAR-branded Kool-Aid long enough to put money into a new road-racing series that will feature cars that actually look like their road-going counterparts, instead of being a reasonable facsimile of fleet sales cars.
You would think that the idea of creating a new racing series that might actually bolster market share for the Detroit-based manufacturers would be appealing.
We'll see if any of them can muster the cojones to get it done.
