Star Mazda Demise Just in Time to De-Buzz IndyCar Celebration

Last night I read this from Jenna Fryer about tumultuous IndyCar needing to get beyond the drama that has dogged it all season, seemingly cropping up at just the wrong time to ruin any positive momentum in the series.

With the IndyCar championship celebration set for Thursday, some 17 weeks after the title was won, Jenna wrote: "Perhaps this week will indeed belong to (Ryan) Hunter-Reay, drama-free, and he can celebrate his title with his Andretti team."

About an hour later, cue the drama. The Star Mazda Series -- the middle rung on the Mazda Road to Indy -- announced it was shutting down and trying to find a buyer. A memo posted on their site announced "after 22 years of growth and a proud record of helping young motor racing talent build careers in the racing industry, we regret to advise you the Star Mazda Championship will not continue into the 2013 season under its present ownership."

The memo makes it clear the series is looking for "a qualified buyer." Read the entire statement here.

IndyCar reacted pretty rapidly with a this tweeted statement:

Statement from INDYCAR on news regarding Star Mazda ownership: INDYCAR remains committed to the Mazda Road to Indy and sanctioning a ladder system for young drivers to reach the IZOD IndyCar Series and Indianapolis 500. We remain in contact with our partners at Mazda in identifying possible solutions that would continue to bridge the ladder between USF2000 and Firestone Indy Lights for the 2013 season and beyond.

It's too bad for the Mazda Road to Indy since I perceived the Star Mazda rung to be among the most stable and entertaining of the three-rung ladder. While the first rung, USF2000, featured raw drivers bashing into each other causing races that were ridiculously short of green-flag laps, and the top-rung Firestone Indy Lights offered roughly 12 cars per race last year, Star Mazda seemed to have its crap together.

If ever obscurity was good news, now is the case. The trouble in Star Mazda probably won't harsh the IndyCar celebration Thursday to badly since an estimated 193 people not related to a competing driver even know Star Mazda exists. But for the hard-cores, it's a bit of a buzz killer.

Still, it's more drama and I feel for the drivers (including Woman of pressdog® Ashley Freiberg) and league employees left looking for somewhere else to race or work. Cue the spike in interest in ARCA and NASCAR K&N Pro Series. Plus the sports car feeders as well. Gotta go where the jobs are, I guess.

Comments

[Ted Wolfram]

Just one more shoe that drops....when are the owners of the IRL dba as IndyCar going to come to the realization that their series is slowing sinking into oblivion?

Closing the office in LA is another admission that there is little interest in trying something new and different.

I talk to fewer and fewer people who give a poop, in fact most feel it will only improve if the IRL goes bankrupt...taking all the contracts with it, and a new series being born with INNOVATION as it's primary goal and under a strict cost control formula....which would bring new teams and new ideas.

[crazyfbs]

I wonder if Star Mazda is trying to sell itself because Mazda has stopped production of rotary engines. Not that Mazda actual makes the engines for the series, but did all the R&D work on them, in fact I bet Mazda is the only company that has done R&D on a truly radical engine since the mid-70s and then used the work in production. This also begets the question, "Why did Mazda not want to make an engine to run in the Indy 500?" I would have thought that they would have at least put one team under sponsorship at the IICS level given that they are the sponsors for the entire Road to Indy system.

[FTHurley]

There is no room in the market for a full-season open wheel racing series when NASCAR puts 100+ races on live TV every years. Having a full multi-tiered ladder system sounds great, but it's just not a justifiable structure given IndyCar's popularity. I'm increasing of the opinion that the future of IndyCar will be a small number of high-profile events throughout the years with much larger purses. Get ready for the six-race-long IndyCar Series. And no, I'm not saying that with a defeatist tone. I think it's a good thing.

[redcar]

Couldn't they use this as an opportunity to restructure the minor league series to make it simpler, cheaper, more understandable. And to make the Cooper series and Lights stronger?

(I don't know enough about it, but--for example--could you run two "classes" in Cooper like sports cars?)

[Roggespierre]

This makes perfect sense from an economic perspective. What justification could there possibly be for a three-rung system that feeds a sport that draws fewer than 300K television viewers?

There is none.

The market value of IndyCar is in line with the cost of F2000. Until that problem is solved, the news will continue to be the norm.

[Chris Lukens]

One more road racing series to go TU. Add them to the list of F-5000, Can-Am, Trans-Am (twice), CART (also twice), ALMS, and a few more I can’t remember right now.
The only time I saw the Star Mazda’s race was at PPIR before an INDYCAR race. They were touring the track at 150-160 mph. The speed surprised me as I was expecting slightly better than F-Ford performance. The point is they were running the SAME speed as the USAC sprint cars, and the sprint cars had to run a spacer in the injectors to slow them down.

[bradman]

A "feeder series" can only be called such if it actually does "feed" drivers into the next level. How much has that really happened in IndyCar? As soon as a second-tier F1 driver looses his ride everyone yells "Come to IndyCar!" So much for the youngsters in the lower series moving up. The cold reality is that talented drivers are a dime a dozen, its sponsorship money to fund a team that is in short supply. That being the case, in actuality, there is no need for "feeder series"; "support series" to flesh out a race weekend, sure; but "feeder series"? I'm not seeing it.

[Borland1023]

Has the IRL gone so far down the rung that they can't get a rental hall for a weekend date? To me, that was the big news here. Mazda? I didn't even know they still had that series.

[The Speedgeek]

Erm, it appears that Dan Anderson believes that there's a place for the middle rung of the ladder, seeing as how it was just relaunched today as the Pro Mazda Championship. Here's all the economic justification necessary: there are easily 20-30 kids out there who either have rich daddies or can scrape together a few hundred thousand bucks in sponsorship from companies (either family owned or who are happy to get exposure from the 50,000 or so people who see the series in person, since the TV package is so hard to find). Presto, viable economic model.

Look, I'm not super thrilled about IndyCar's long term prospects at the moment, and Lights obviously needs a much cheaper car before it'll be fully relevant again, but the ladder system as a whole, and the SM/PMC and USF2000 series themselves are not broken. Those series' car counts last year should tell you all you need to know about that. Folks can probably quit stressing out about either of those.

Now, on to fixing some actual problems, right?