92nd Running of the Indianapolis 500

[Zytek_Fan]

Originally Posted by Rockefella

We can doubt it, but the F1 circus is a giant attention whore. Hell, look at the Monaco GP.

EDIT: By advertising dollars, I meant it would go towards the team. Say for example if Super Aguri picked her up prior to the start of this season. I'd bet the added advertising money due to a female being in the sport and arguably America's biggest racing figure at the moment could have kept them afloat.

Let's just hope the advertising dollars don't come from female hygiene products


F1 just needs an American driver that is actually somewhat good to raise interest again.

[scubasteve87]

Unless F1 returns to racing in the US it won't get an American driver that Americans are familiar with and will pay much attention to. Plus they did have one and summarily canned him despite being faster than his teammate. Since F1 left Indy and canned Speed, there are a lot of wounds with casual fans. I myself still watch/appreciate F1, but for it to ever be anything more than a niche sport in the US, it'll have to have a "name" US driver and race at an identifiable to the casual fan US venue ie. Indy, Daytona, Sebring

Also, a lot of the people who watch NASCAR (and like them or not, you probably need those fans to switch over to make F1 huge here) percieve road courses as boring and lacking passing. If these fans leave NASCAR they're much more likely to watch a half oval IRL than fully road course F1.

Finally, there's the problem of TV time. With races in Europe and Asia being the vast majority, US fans will either need to be hardcore enough to wake up (basically the current group of F1 fans here) or content to watch replays on TV. People here won't want to watch the tape delay and likely already know the winner. Overall, the reasons why F1 will always be a niche here mirror the reasons soccer has never really caught on. While the rest of the world watches every move in the sport and roots on their favored driver, most people here couldn't care less. Sad, but true.