2010-05-01

Kansas = FAIL

Lets face facts, if you just watched the Road Runner Turbo Indy 300, you wasted about 2.5 hours of your Saturday, about 1.5 hours of it was commercials. It just wasn't entertaining, and I'm not the only one who felt that way. About the 65,000 empty seats tells you a bunch of people knew it wasn't worth spending money on.

It's time for this race to go the way of Nashville and Richmond in recent history and be left off the 2011 Izod Indycar Series schedule.

I know all you ovalcentric fans will give me crap for saying it, but I'll be good and even say it should be replaced by 1 or 2 ovals, New Hampshire Motor Speedway and 1 of Michigan, Milwaukee, Pheonix or Ponoco (whoever puts an effort forth, probably none of them, but you get the point).

I've made it known I like road courses and street courses more than ovals, but I still enjoy watching a good oval race.

However, seeing a track with a capacity of 81,687 with 65,000 empty seats or so gives off such a poor atmosphere. I mean they couldn't even hide it from the cameras.

Now, every good oval needs to have a couple lanes you can run. Kansas does have those lanes, but each of it's lanes runs the same speed. There is no differential in speeds between the bottom and top line, and the fact there is no lifting means every single car is running 210mph around the track. How can you pass when everyone around is you running 210mph? You can't!

Talking about the lack of lifting, this is getting stale. I don't care who can get the top speed in an air tunnel, or crank out the best results on a 7-post shaker rig. I care who can handle the car the best, and watching Scott Dixon run around Kansas Speedway at a constant 210mph is not fun. It's more or less bullshit racing. No, it's not even racing, it's just watching speed vs. speed when there is no talent involved.

If you can explain to me how Milka Duno went from being 8 seconds off the pace at the road courses, and .5 seconds off the pace at Kansas I'd love to know. I'm pretty sure she didn't pick up 7.5 seconds between then and now.

I want an oval race to pick out the best drivers in the field, not the best car.

So if today is the last time we see an IRL race at Kansas Speedway, I'll be dancing in the streets!

This track doesn't deserve to be on the schedule. The lack of people in the crowd proves it. The lack of need for talent proves it. The lack of good racing proves it.

3 comments:

The American Mutt said...

I watched this race and thought "lets just give the best oval championship trophy to the engineer...he's clearly the one winning this race."

Anonymous said...

Agree with what you said except that there are clear examples of better drivers overcoming a bad car and others who can't. Would Marco have lifted as much in the Go Daddy car as DP did? Or would he have parked it? Better not go there.

Anonymous said...

You're wrong that there was no lifting at Kansas. This is a really obvious point, so you might want to take into consideration that your bias is preventing you from seeing really obvious things. Here's the point: if there was no lifting going on, then why was the field spread out? If they were racing flat there would have been packs of cars like we used to see at this race back when the track was knew and the cars had tons of grip. Also, when you see an in-car camera shot and you hear the RPMs drop... that's called "lifting."

I doubt you know what the attendance was either. It's not too easy guessing while watching on TV, because when people have a chance to spread out, they do. Seeing the stands from a distance, I thought "Geez, the place is empty," but in closer shots I realized there were more people there than I thought. A local paper published 35,000. Is that right? No idea. If a place holds 80,000, a crowd of 40,000 will end up looking like empty stands on TV. That's just the way it is, unfortunately. But, don't worry... you'll live.

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