1/4 Post Report

Sorry to have been away so long during the season, but finals come first and there hasn’t been a whole lot to report on in the racing world. But let’s start with some F1 news.F1Unfortunately the first of the CBS F1 races was the San Marino Grand Prix. Allegedly it was a great race and unfortunately I missed it. Fred Alonso won but Schummi was a close second and word has it that if there were a couple more laps, he may have won.JV finally scored a couple of points and his fans are all dancing in the streets. I’m sure they will be back on the sidelines after this weeks Spanish GP.On the political front, the nine team consortium that was to bring Bernie, the FIA and the F1 championship to its knees took a severe blow when both Red Bull and Jordan/Midland broke ranks and attended the FIA meeting on April 15th along with Ferrari. This is certainly a blow to the consortium and may have further reaching impact with people like Kevin Kalkhoven who may have had the infrastructure to start up the F1 rival series.Speaking of Kalkhoven, him and Gerry Forsythe’s ownership of Cosworth took a hit last week as Red Bull announced an agreement for 2006 and 2007 with Ferrari. This leaves the Cosworth owners as having only the CCWS and Minardi as customers. While they have a steady stream of business with the CCWS as it is the only allowed engine, Minardi can pull the plug at any time. Besides, the R & D for F1 is cost prohibitive and may be more than KK can handle as CC continues its money woes.This week at Spain, look for wild crowds as points leader Fred Alonso comes home and has to be considered a favorite for the race. Will Ferrari be back in the hunt? Can BAR overcome its early season troubles? Will JPM be healed from his “tennis” injury? The show is back on Speed so get up early Sunday and find out!!IRLIt’s May and that means Indy 500 time!! The track opens Sunday for ROP and Tuesday for the real deal. With the new qualifying setup in effect, it should be interesting to see if there is any more excitement generated.Going in I will only say that I expect Tony Kanaan to win the race.Last weekend the IRL put on their annual Japan show. Gentleman Dan won yet again, his third in four races this season. Scheckter nearly made the finish, but ran out of gas two laps from the end.An interesting thought came to me yesterday as I was putting together the 500 pool for this year. How much of the crowd at the 500 are really race fans and how many go just because it is the 500? I thought about the people I had spoken to hear at work and it was funny to hear some of the comments. Things like “Is Arie driving this year?”, and “Who is Michael and Little Al running for?” It got me thinking that Oliver Trucking, I was the only one who could name a winner of one of the races so far this season in the IRL. That put me at about 2% of the Oliver employees who are race fans (IRL). Okay, pretty much as I figured.So I posed the question to race fans in my address book. I found 6 bona fide fans out of 154 contacts. I posed the question such that do any of the 6 think there are 10%, less than 10% or more than 10% real race fans who will be at the Indy 500 on May 29th. We’re talking about approximately 25,000 people.My thoughts are this. There are maybe 10% that would know who had won an IRL race earlier in the season. This is the definition of a race fan for what I am talking about. I think there is probably less than 10%. I think most people who go to the 500 are there for the event. I base this on TV numbers and attendance at the previous races. 8k showed at Phoenix. Those are probably 8k real fans, but that left nearly 80%of the stands empty. All of the sudden at Indy, 32 times more race fans show up. It just doesn’t stand to reason.Now the CCWS fans want to claim that race fans no longer go to Indy. I’ll give them this, that I believe the empty seats at Indy are “race fans” who have sided with the CCWS or against FTRG. But the fact is, Indy is still the single biggest one day sporting event in the world.The fact is also that the people who just come because of the event are what makes any event as large as Indy. Does anyone really think that everyone at the Daytona 500 is a race fan? As far back as I can remember, there have been the “Indy” fan. Those people who only go to one race a year and are there for the party and the atmosphere and not the race itself.I’m going to delve into this a little deeper over the summer and see if I can get a handle on who is a race fan and what makes them such.See you all at the track Sunday!NASCARTalladega 1 is in the books and Jeff Gordon wins again. Jimmy Johnson has turned into a one man wrecking ball and the taxicab boys go into May and the long boring middle of the season begins! Wake me up for the Allstate 400!