IndyCar at Fontana – The Morning After

Will Power celebrates his 2014 IndyCar Championship. (Photo: Chris Owens, IndyCar)

IndyCar finale rapid reaction ..

Congrats to Will Power on the championship. I was glad to see Will win because losing it again in the finale may have made him a threat to hurt himself and others. I like Will because he has a unique personality and a bit of “screw it, I’m going for the win!” streak in him. Both are refreshing.

Tony Kanaan won and kissed his wife’s abdomen, which many took as a sign that she’s preggers. If so, hat tip to Tony for coming up with a unique way to announce it to the world. Tony said when you drive the #10 for Chippy Ganassi, pressure to win is always riding shotgun. So Tony won the finale and relieved a bit of the pressure. Still, all in all, not a great year for the Chipster.

Ed Carpenter came back from a pit speeding penalty early to finish P3. Would have been interesting to see how he did sans penalty, but speeding is a driver error, so if Ed is raging, he's raging at himself. Ed Carpenter Racing represented itself well this year. It will merge with Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing next year. Will be interesting to see what’s what with that team. I assume Fuzzy's Vodka will stay with Ed. Haven't heard otherwise. Also haven't heard that confirmed.

Another of what’s becoming the standard IndyCar oval race. Aka, a Festival of Tire Management with dramatic drop off in speeds (like, 10 mph) from fresh tires to old tires. Lots of coming and going in the pack. Brief moments of two-wide as cars pass each other, but single file most of the time. The preceding was a description, not a complaint. There is passing as the teams who hit the setup to create the most speed for the least tire wear moved to the front. The days of IndyCar's going two-wide, three rows deep for 15 laps are long long gone. IndyCar on big ovals aside from Indy these days greatly resembles NASCAR on big ovals. Today’s NASCAR race at Atlanta will likely be similar to last night’s IndyCar race at Fontana … strung out, but with cars advancing through the string, taking multiple laps to figure out a way around a slower car. Is what it is.

Indy and Iowa were the two best ovals on the schedule this year. They have the aero right at Indy and the configuration of Iowa just seems to fit IndyCars. Iowa also benefited from a late yellow that ramped up the drama considerably.

The schedule is ridiculous. Starting your Big Championship Finale at 10 p.m. Eastern? Sorry, that's horrid planning. Before you get bunched, I KNOW they had to start it that late because any earlier and the drivers are driving into sun glare on a part of the track. Obviously, safety first. I get that. But what I don’t get is, knowing the fact that there’s glare late in the afternoon, why have the finale race on this day at this track? Why schedule it in late August when you have to choose between racing when it’s surface-of-the-sun hot earlier in the afternoon or at 10:20 p.m. Eastern?

It’s like IndyCar is daring tracks to ditch them. Schedule 2014 Houston during a time of year when even cactus plants are saying “shit, it’s effing hot out here.” Nobody shows, race goes away for 2015. The good news is MAV TV signed up to sponsor the race at Fontana for two more years. That, all by itself, probably means the race will continue. WHEN the Fontana race will be held is the question.

But -- wait a second -- let's let the coffee kick in here and ponder ..  the TV audience that IndyCar attracts (outside of the Indy 500, of course) is pretty hard-core, so maybe the TV and in-person audience from last night’s race wouldn't have been THAT different if they held the race earlier in the day but in September or October. Maybe Mark Miles did the math and said, "Screw it; we're not going to elongate our schedule just to gain 25,000 fans on TV." It's something to consider.In business you have to know what potential customers you DON'T want because they aren't profitable, so you don't want to waste energy and resources chasing them when you could be using that energy and resources to go after the bigger fish. Plus the late start East Coast was prime time in the Los Angeles market, which is reasonably huge. Maybe Mark Miles is a math GENIUS. I am not being sarcastic at all here. 

A bigger threat to IndyCar these days than lack of TV audience is lack of tracks who want to host races. With MAV TV signed back up, that's a good sign for keeping Fontana, at least. I’d love to pump some truth serum into the Fontana track management and hear what they really thought about yesterday’s event.

Did IndyCar do anything special for fans at Fontana in light of the Championship Event? Concert? Human cannonballs? Plus it up in any way at the track? I know, silly question. Fontana is not located in Indiana. I withdraw the question. (Still, if you were there, let me know if they did something. I'm honestly interested.)

No use getting bunched about it. Seems weird to me, but I’m not raking down the big cash to make these decisions. It will be highly fascinating to see when and where IndyCar races in 2015 when the official schedule comes out. We’re not sure when that will be, but it has to be sometime before 2015, right? We shall see.

Comments

[Nathaniel Gomez]

Congrats to Will Power. Championship well deserved. Schedule is about a month too short. On track product was generally outstanding. 11 different winners this season, a good thing. Rookie class was awesome. Shout out for Aleshin for a speedy recovery. Hope to see him back next year. Fisher and Carpenter join forces next year, and new aero kits! Off season too darn long though.

[Robert Black]

I was there, and I was really surprised how entertaining the race was, even with no caution flags to keep the field bunched up. I thought there was plenty of back-and-forth, with guys coming to the front and falling back and then catching up again. It was a really good show.

There was plenty of stuff for the fans, too - a concert, a motorcycle jumping demonstration, a wrestling demonstration (uh, I didn't stick around for that part). The most popular attraction was probably the misters, though, because it was freakin' hot. Auto Club members (like me) got free garage and pit passes with their tickets. The garages at Fontana have a raised walkway down the middle, which is awesome because it allows you to go in and see the people working on the cars.

I still have a blog entry of my own to write about my encounter with Sarah Fisher. I'll come back and post a link to it. For now, though, I'll mention that I spotted the Fisher/O'Gara kids hanging out in the garage area, being taken around by one set of their grandparents. Zoey already has her own toddler-sized set of hearing-protection headphones, and she was actually carried into the garage at one point. They kept Daniel out in the stroller, but it was still plenty noisy, and yet he slept soundly the whole time. Only a few weeks old, and he's already used to engine noise. :-)

[Chiefswon]

I enjoyed the race last night but listening to the hard core fans was just as entertaining. Thanks for the read. I think all 300K of us had fun. I can't do anything about it but you are right.

[redcar]

I fell asleep. Not sure if it was because of the hour or the lack of interest.

"resembles Nascar on big ovals." say no more.

Looking forward to next year.

[Ron Ford]

Good information from Mr. Black. It is always good to hear from someone who was at the race as opposed to we couch critics.
As for Mark Miles being a math genius, I know he can add and subtract because that's what the schedule consists of each year.

Now back to real life for six months:(

[Brett Smithson IndyRaceReviewer]

Thought it was a tremendous race, even with Power & the Penske Empire taking the Champ. TK deserved the win, Penske was penalized along with everyone else, and after Aleshin's "catastrophic death like experience" (can you guess the movie?) everyone behaved themselves. Had heard of ill handling cars, but never an ill handling driver. It's gonna be a long cold off season, kiddies - grab your booties.

[Dylan]

I thought the race was the 2014 season in microcosm, and I'm not so sure that was a good thing. If you like technical racing then you're probably pretty happy, but if you like close racing NASCAR trucks at Mosport delivered more than Indycar, Indy and Iowa excepted. To be honest I'd have enjoyed Indycar more this year if drivers I liked did well. Hinchcliffe and Newgarden didn't win, Simona is gone, outside of the wins by Ed and RHR the Americans in general struggled, no Karam, and while I do like Kanaan and Helio and Power it just isn't the same. Next year I can only hope Hinchcliffe recovers and Newgarden goes on a tear. ECR finished 8th in entrant points despite crashing out of the Indy 500 and Conway having no top tens outside of his wins. What can Newgarden do with that team?

[Ron Ford]

Will Power was pretty funny at the awards celebration. I thought Leigh Diffey did a good job as emcee.

[Robert Black]

As promised, here's my Sarah Fisher story from Saturday night:

http://bbovenguy.livejournal.com/639850.html

And here's another link for you all, a video of how the one restart of the race looked from my seat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFgB7dmx7QY&list=UU9_SHugNlpPyOHiVpJqvatA

Have they said anything about the race attendance? I thought the crowd was much bigger than the last Fontana race I went to in 2003, but not as big as the 1998 CART race, which I also went to.