How to make the Indy Racing League relevant

The Indy Racing League kicks off its 2007 tonight at Homestead-Miami Speedway in south Florida.

Did you know that?

I bet not. And if you did, you're one of about 100 people, most of which live in central Indiana, that actually cares.

I fall into the category of not really caring about the Indy Racing League, but I really want to. At one time, open-wheel Indy car racing was it, and the pinnacle of the sport was the Indy 500. Nowadays the big series is NASCAR, and the biggest race of the year is the Daytona 500.

How tragic is that?

I've got three suggestions for the Indy Racing league to get the league and this brand of auto racing back to prominence. First, I'll explain how I think the Indy Racing League got to where it is today, then I'll explain what it can do to rectify the situation.

How the IRL got here
There are two major events that got the Indy Racing League where it is today:

1) The split with CART (obviously)
2) Allowing NASCAR to race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway

I think the latter is the biggest root cause of the IRL's failures. Why? It made NASCAR legitimate.

In the early 90s, the Indy 500 was still the biggest race in the world. It attracted some of the best racing talent, including the occasional NASCAR driver. Anyone who was anyone, with exception of most Formula 1 drivers, came to IMS to chase a drink of milk on a hot Sunday afternoon. IMS was the motor sport's Mecca. Even the famed road course in Monte Carlo didn't measure up to the prestige of the 2-1/2 mile oval. But when NASCAR took the green flag at IMS in 1994, it turned this southern sport into a national sport. It was validation for a sport that spent most of its time racing in places most of the nation had never heard of, like Bristol, Talladega, Darlington and Rockingham, just to name a few. Now NASCAR was racing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, an honor previously only given to the best open-wheel drivers in the world.

The beginning of the end came after the first Brickyard 400. Tony George split CART into two series, the IRL and CART, and made the Indy 500 an Indy car-only event with its new technical regulations and point system. The financial barriers to entry were to big for CART teams to compete (who wants to invest millions of dollars in R&D for one race?), let alone the political barriers caused by the split. As a result, the Indy 500 and the IRL lost the most famed names in open-wheel motorsport: Andretti, Mears and Unser. Now the IRL was left with names like Sharp, Ray, Brack, Lazier and Calkins (you're forgiven if you just went to Wikipedia to look those names up - I had to do it myself).

Now put yourself in the position of an up-and-coming driver circa about 1995. What are your options? You can go to CART, which has a preference for foreign-born drivers and is suffering from the political fallout of the split. And there's no Indy 500. Your second option is to join the IRL, which is just cutting its teeth, has little sponsorship and doesn't pay very well. You still get the chance to race in the Indy 500, but without names like Andretti, Mears and Unser competing in the race, how prestigious is it anyway? Or, your third option is to go to NASCAR, which has been around for years and now is starting to see a boom in popularity because it's getting increased media attention and sponsorships as a result of its recent expansion into new markets. Plus you get race against guys named Petty, Earnhardt and Wallace. Tough choice, right?

And so it begins. NASCAR becomes the dominant sport, taking drivers like Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon and Ryan Newman out of the Indiana open-wheel ranks and leaving the IRL to pick and chose from CART castoffs and NASCAR wannabes. The IRL is just another feeder circuit to the big show of NASCAR.

The IRL would start to see a bit of a resurgence when CART team owners and drivers bailed on CART (which brought names like Mears, Andretti and Unser back into the fold), but it was never the same. NASCAR is here to stay, and as long as drivers like Tony Stewart continue to find greeners pastures in the south, the Indycar racing will never rekindle its lost glory.

How can the IRL start to attract top US racing talent? It needs money. It needs to make big bucks, and it needs to pay big bucks.


What the IRL can do
To this point, the IRL appeals to its core audience - the open-wheel racing enthusiast. That's a good thing, except that this is a really small group of people. That makes the IRL a niche offering. When you have the Indianapolis 500 on your schedule every year, your league should not be a niche offering.

The IRL has tried marketing to the masses, most of which include its most marketable asset, Danica Patrick, but it has fallen short in terms of attracting top sponsorship, top auto racing talent and big television ratings. The IRL can only go so far in marketing Danica's looks, because it's hard to be sexy in a fire suit and helmet. At the end of the day, when she's in the cockpit of the car, she looks like all the other men.

So what can the IRL do? Here are my five suggestions to make the IRL relevant to the mass market.

1. Find some personality.
Everyone loves Dale Earnhardt Jr. because:
1) he looks average
2) he sounds average with his Southern drawl
3) he uses small, simple words to communicate (no chance he's smarter than us) and doesn't use perfect English (most of us don't)
4) he does average stuff, like drink Budweiser and hunt, when he's not racing

Basically, Dale Earnhardt is Average Joe American except for the fact that he has a famous father and he races cars. That's a slam dunk in terms of marketing. He's the ambassador for Middle America.

Who in the IRL represents Average Joe American? Keep thinking. It's hard to figure because we don't know who these drivers are first of all, but second, even if we do know them, we don't know them.

The IRL needs to get these guys and gals face time. Get them in front of a camera during race broadcasts. Get them on the 24-hour sports networks. Get them at NASCAR races on off-weeks acting as ambassadors to the sport. Hey, y'all, I like them stock cars too. And we turn left a lot. And if it turns out that some of them have rotten attitudes, run with it! It worked for Tony Stewart. It worked for Dale Earnhardt. The only watch out here is to make sure these rotten attitudes aren't elitist rotten attitudes. Perhaps the IRL could coach them in being pissed off the way an Average Joe American would be pissed. That daggum guy done cut me off and crashed my car ... I'm gonna git 'em next week (then they could make up to each other on the day after a race and say the IRL's a family sport and we need to be good role models to American families. Then do it all over again at the next race, because people love it when racers get pissed).

2. Get hooked up with NASCAR
The majority of American auto racing fans watch NASCAR every week. Some how, some way, the IRL needs to get their product in front of these fans while they're watching NASCAR. They can do this via advertising, which is the most obvious way to do it. Another way, as I mentioned above, is to get the IRL drivers at events. I think the best way, however, is to get IRL races linked into a NASCAR weekend. There are several options:

1. Daytona 500
2. Daytona 400
3. Las Vegas
4. Sonoma
5. Watkins Glen
6. Brickyard 400 (have the IRL development series race at IMS after qualifying)
7. California
8. Richmond
9. Michigan

That's just to name a few. Who cares if it the race appears as an under card race to the main event? The IRL is already a virtual feeder series.

To avoid appearing inferior to NASCAR, it can be billed as a partnership of equals: two major motorsport series combined together in one weekend. There could be synergies in cost sharing, league advertising and sponsorships. You could even fathom partnerships with NASCAR and IRL teams. Say, perhaps, Joe Gibbs Racing fields an IRL team that carries the sponsorships of its NASCAR teams. The brand identity expands into another series, and the sponsors can strengthen their association with the race teams as a result (when you go to Home Depot, you think Tony Stewart and IRL Driver X, and they both race under the same umbrella ... and, just maybe, we see Tony back in an Indy car).

NASCAR growth is starting to slow and television ratings appear to have peaked. This could be a win for NASCAR in that it starts to appeal to the niche Indy car fan market that usually snubs NASCAR.

This could be a win-win for both IRL and NASCAR.

3. Make nice with CART
I see the CART and IRL as being similar to XM Radio and Sirius Radio. Both have very high fixed costs. Both compete for sponsorship. Both not only compete against each other, but also compete against other forms of entertainment (CART and IRL with NASCAR; XM and Sirius with terrestrial radio and iPods). In both examples, the companies are beating each other up for the right to get beat up by other markets and technologies. What's the good in that?

The CART and IRL need to get back together. They need to share sponsorship dollars. They need to share the fixed cost burden of developing race cars. They need to have the best drivers in each series compete against each other in order to raise the level of prestige of this kind of auto racing. They need to stop confusing the open-wheel consumer with two different brands of the same product, because there just isn't enough open-wheel consumers to consume two different racing series. The free market will eventually run its course and either one or both series will have to fold. Without solid television revenue and ticket revenue, it will happen. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't happened to CART already.

Tony George got what he wanted in the beginning - an open-wheel series with low costs so that the "little guy" could get into big-time racing. Well, the IRL has come full circle with its big teams and escalating costs. At the end of the day, Tony George's dream was just a pie-in-the-sky hope because teams were allowed to spend more and more money on development and were allowed to make more and more money through sponsorship. But, the difference now is that Tony George holds all the marbles, where as he didn't before. That should make unification a better deal for him, even though he didn't get what he wanted.

In closing
Without unification, at least one of the series will fold, if not both. If they can unify, perhaps they can both struggle along in their competition with NASCAR. Or, if they can unify and partner with NASCAR as I have described above, they can get in on the Microsoft-esk monoply that NASCAR holds on American auto racing. Finally, if the IRL could get drivers to relate to Average Joe American, it will make acceptance of this series easier to achieve.