Posted Jun 24, 2011, 3:42 AM
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Join Date: Dec 2007
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Open letter to city of Austin from AutoWeek editor, re F1, run away!
Open letter to city of Austin from AutoWeek editor, re F1, run away!
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Quote:
By DUTCH MANDEL on 6/22/2011
As the editorial director of America's largest racing magazine and a guy who has grown up around racing and racers, who has worked for a professional race team and who was weaned on horsepower and Castrol fumes, I have two words for the Austin City Council and its constituents before Thursday's vote to bless the proposed 2012 Austin Grand Prix:
Run away.
I don't say this out of spite or malice. I want a Formula One event in the United States as much as anyone does. But Austin is already what's right in America! It's a city that's, by almost all accounts, vibrant and exciting, filled with great music, people and food. It has extraordinary educational facilities and fantastic surrounding scenery and carries a thoughtful and an eclectic vibe. Austin is comfortable in its own skin, and as a resident of a city--Detroit--that has long yearned to redefine itself and its reputation, I say that if you allow Bernie Ecclestone and his F1 circus to attach themselves remora-like to you, dear Austin, it will be an enormous and very expensive lesson.
If I read correctly, the Austin race organizers are ready to pay $4 million annually to trigger access to a Texas state fund and, later on, access to revenue generated by sales tax attributable directly to the race that will cover the $25 million or so that Ecclestone charges promoters each year to host F1.
Hey, I want that deal. For $40 million I give you, you give me a quarter billion, right?
You council members know to whom the money flows, right? Take a Google gander at Ecclestone, he who holds F1's marketing rights. (You may stumble on recent news accounts of his 22-year-old daughter, Petra, who last week paid $85 million for Candy Spelling's Los Angeles-area mansion . . . to go with her $90 million crib in London. But I digress.)
Know that nothing happens without Bernie's approval and his piece of the take. Nothing. If you want a "green space," he'll get his green, too. The local "Rattlesnake Burgers" sold trackside for $10 a pop? Mr. E probably takes $3 apiece.
The point, gentle people of Austin, is not to be rushed into doing anything you don't want to do. If after sufficient due diligence--surely you've talked with past U.S. F1 organizers and city fathers from, say, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Watkins Glen, Long Beach and Detroit and heard their collective tal e of woe. If you want to offer up keys (and every other city part) to F1, that's your choice. But think about this: If the cradle of American motorsports, the home of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, failed to keep F1 in America, what makes Austin--not the promoters, who have a bunch of reasons, maybe quite true, for why they are different--think it can succeed? Again, I'm talking to the fine people of Austin, not the people directly behind the track project.
Remember: Bernie always gets his money. Always.
Again, I like F1. AutoWeek has covered Grand Prix racing for all of our 53 years. I wake early to watch qualifying live from exotic locales such as Monaco and Seoul.
I just don't want to see you hurt. I like your city too much to have that happ en.
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I am still very excited about this track and the positive implications of this. But as I learn more about the race's history in the US, I am beginning to worry.
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