There’s no doubt that the IndyCar offseason is always rough.
With six months of no racing and a long, slow, dark winter – at least for a lot of us – there is a lot of waiting. Because, as Steve McQueen once said, that’s all there is to life before and after racing. Waiting.
One other thing that makes the IndyCar offseason even longer is with no races and no real driver news, we find ourselves instead listening to the ways that management is constantly rumbling, stumbling, and bumbling at pretty much every turn.
This isn’t new, of course. I’ve been following IndyCar in its plethora of versions for almost 45 years, and so this comes as no shock to me, and if you’ve followed the series for any length of time, you shouldn’t be shocked either.
Fortunately, the drivers, teams, broadcast partners, and anyone else who isn’t IndyCar management do a good enough job at what they do that the missteps of management (and hey, while we’re at it, let’s throw race control under the hauler too) tend to be overshadowed.
Most of the time.
Except for, like, right now. I know in their eyes, the idea of being transparent is important, and I can appreciate that. But this is what always happens…big announcements! Big plans! Everything is awesome!
But then, when the time comes, nothing gets delivered.
In the last few weeks, here are a few things that have been flubbed up: the video game is dead, Mark Miles admits that they could’ve handled everything around the Thermal Club race better, and finally, the coup de grâce, the hybrid technology that was supposed to roll out at the start of the season at St. Pete has now been pushed back to the ambiguous timetable of “after the Indianapolis 500”.
It’s always something, isn’t it? Nothing about this series ever gets done on-time or the way it is supposed to. We are constantly being given hype that in the end falls flat. IndyCar has seemed to adopt the “three outcomes” that is popular in baseball. It’s either a walk (kick the idea down the road), a strikeout (at a very high rate), or a home run.
I’m fortunate that in my circle of friends are some very successful people. Why they hang out with me, I have no idea, but one of them believes that you should reinvent your company every couple of years. So, ask yourself this: when was the last time IndyCar reinvented itself?
We have a chassis that has raced since 2012, and while it has been tried and true – and, most importantly, safe — it still dates back to 2012. There’s no video game, IndyCar is a non-entity on iRacing, and if I have to watch video content that was created by another Indianapolis-based company by people who use to work with IndyCar and all look the same, I’m gonna scream.
And, as we are just finding out, if things don’t change between now and 2026, Honda is thinking about leaving.
And, since I have been working on this for several days, here’s another thing: Pato O’Ward, the most marketable – and most under-utilized – driver in IndyCar, said this in a recent story comparing the series to Formula 1.
“To be fairly honest with you, a lot of Americans have no idea what IndyCar is.”
Yay.
I mean, this is IndyCar’s guy – our guy – saying the painfully obvious truth.
And here’s another one: IndyCar needs to get its shit together.
It’s time for a reinvention. Check that, it’s way past time for a reinvention.
Once again, the series has reached a critical stage, and it’s time for it to go in a different direction. Should it be through a management change? A philosophical one? I have no clue, but then again, I don’t get paid lots of money to have one.
What I do know, as someone who has followed this sport for a really long time, is that things are starting to feel a bit familiar, and not in a good way. Same people, same ideas, no thoughts of joining the rest of the sports world in 2023 and embracing a forward-thinking mindset that gets fans excited.
Major League Baseball was stagnant. They overhaul their rules, which ruffle the feathers of the old guard, but bring fans back to ballpark in droves, and spend a summer having marketable (and international) players like Ronald Acuña and Shohei Otahni doing things that have never been done before.
Put it this way, this past Monday Acuña won a Home Run Derby in Venezuela, and I have seen multiple tweets with more than 20,000 impressions on several formerly-known-as-Twitter accounts, with another account reaching over 100,000 impressions in just over three hours.
That’s what happens when you actually focus on and build superstars.
NBA ratings and fan interest wanes before Christmas. Bring on the In-Season Tournament, which saw guys absolutely playing their asses off like it was April or May instead, and, if you want a local angle, put the Indiana Pacers on national TV two more times than they were previously scheduled and gave an organization a little look into what might happen to the team and local interest if they went for it and committed to building a championship team.
Let’s add one more thing: the In-Season Tournament championship game Friday night had the best NBA non-Christmas viewership of any game since 2016.
Game-changers.
Where’s IndyCar’s game-changer? Is there anybody in charge who is capable of doing it, or are we seemingly going to do what we always do and focus on the Indianapolis 500 and hope that is the catalyst for other things?
New ideas bring new fans, and innovative ideas bring young fans, which is also desperately needed.
I know, I’m beating a dead horse and echoing something you and I have probably all been thinking for a long time. What’s the definition of insanity? Oh yeah, doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result.
It’s time to stop the insanity. IndyCar, it’s your move.
OK, rant over. I promise I’ll be more fun from here on out.
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