Quote:
Originally Posted by the Genral
I was a little disappointed and embarrassed by all the empty seats especially since this event garnered a sizable worldwide tv audience, but I didn't help much by not being able to attend. But from what I read, Epstein and the race teams weren't all that concerned about it. There's guaranteed prize money and allotted points regardless of the fan turnout, and the drivers got to compete on a world class race track. What I didn't see was any shots of downtown or much talk about it, or a whole lot of banter about the track from the drivers like you do with F1. Frankly, there's was a fraction of the buzz that F1 generates. Loved the rolling start and no limit racing. That made it more fun to watch. Just want to mention that when Indy races at TMS, there are quite a few empty seats there too. Another thing I found interesting was that COTA was putting up a $100,000 bonus despite losing out on 25 mil and relatively poor attendance. I do hope they do a better job promoting next year. I saw a ton of adverts regarding the Indy 500 leading up to this race. I know the racers are here to race, get points and get paid, but I'm sure they notice all the empty seats. Would hate to see a been there done that happen and the loss of incentive to come here every year because of that.
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Yeah it was disappointing. There's also a big difference between TMS's and COTA's seating capacities. 75K people at TMS will still leave 40K empty seats on the front stretch alone. 75K people at COTA under this base seating configuration would fill all the reserved seats and still leave 40+K people in general admission. There were a total of only a bit over 30K reserved seats for this race, in the Main, T1, T12, and T15 grandstands, and those grandstands only looked about 1/4 to 1/3 full on average (if I'm being generous). I heard before the race that COTA had only sold a little less than 20K tickets, and from what we saw on Sunday, even that seems optimistic now. And Friday and Saturday, the crowds were really, really small, even in comparison to Sunday.
Gotta disagree tho about the track limits thing. I don't see how it adds anything to the racing, and it actually rewards people for mistakes, or at least it fails to punish them and fails to reward the better teams and drivers for better setup and driving.
Completely agree re: the lack of promotion, but don't hold your breath waiting for that to get better. It's been like this from the very beginning.
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