Lewis Hamilton to NASCAR or to Indy Car w/ Tony Stewart???

Yesterday Speed aired the “Seat Swap” Hamilton vs. Stewart @ Watkins Glen International Raceway. The bad part was it was raining a little bit and they put wet tires on both cars. This isn’t the first time this has happened if we go back to June of 2003 Juan Pablo Montoya (Then a Formula One driver for Williams) jumped into Jeff Gordon’s Cup Car at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Road Course. After all maybe these so called “fun” seat swaps are pretty important. Look at Montoya he quit his F1 ride with McLaren to go to Cup, Montoya has 2 wins but one is on Watkikns Glen and one is on the Infineon Raceway.

Going back to what I said in the first line, this seat swap was sponsored by Mobil 1 because they are a mutual sponsor of the two teams. It was raining at the Glen yesterday for this event, which made even more difficult. First, Stewart and Hamilton made parade laps around the long course at the Glen. Then Hamilton made hot laps in his 3 year old F1 car, he was running laps in the 1:50′s range. After that Stewart came back out in his NASCAR Cup car. He was running laps in the 2:20′s range.

After they were done with the parade laps Hamilton jumped into Stewart’s car and his laps were 9 seconds faster than Stewart’s! This is very surprising to me because he has never driven stick shift and he isn’t used to sitting so far over in the car. Then to please the crowd Hamilton attempted a burn out, and it was a good one. Stewart then jumped into Hamilton’s car he was also running way faster laps then what Hamilton posted in his parade/hot lap on the course. After the whole thing was over Tony said” I’d love to have Lewis as a teammate has information is spot on.” Then Tony mentioned of getting Lewis into a sprint car at Eldora Speedway, the track that Stewart owns. This brings me into my next points.

As I mentioned Hamilton was very fast around the track in a stock car considering the conditions. Stewart has said he wants to field a third car in Cup competition or start up a Nationwide team or both. Look at Montoya again, he raced for Target Chip Ganassi Racing in CART and then he came back to NASCAR with him. Could we see this with Hamilton?? I say yes because after 3 or 4 years when Lewis will started sliding down the ranks in F1 unless he wins a championship again, he will ask Tony if the ride is availaible probably. Stewart would love Hamilton on his team.

Scott Speed is a prime example of this, start in F1 have some success, go to NASCAR epic fail it, then go to Indy Car like he has this year. But this is different with Hamilton behind the wheel, he is much more popular then Speed and will draw more attention. Plus Hamilton is a World Champion. Tony Stewart wants to start up an Indy Car team eventually I think his driver would be Hamilton based on how he learns things and he always wants new challenges. Maybe after he has had success he would go to Penske and run a fourth car there along with Power, Briscoe, and Helio. The Penske thing might not be that bad though. As Dylan wrote a couple of weeks ago, the Hendrick/Penske GM team to F1. Penske is running Chevy’s for the next couple of years and Hendrick is a GM team and Tony Stewart gets his equipment from Hendrick so it could be a three way effort in one. If Hamilton is willing to go back if he makes the jumps it will be ok, and maybe run a second car with Will Power the Indy Car Road Course king. It could be just as successful as Michael Schumacher returning and running great this year.

Why Are Indycar’s Ratings On Versus So Low?

Indycar’s TV ratings from Texas are in and they are not good at all.  On the plus side they are up by 12%.  Which sounds great.  But what happens when you multiple 12% by 0?  You still have zero.  And to most sponsors a .38 might as well be zero.  This is the third year of Indycar on Versus and it still is unable to get decent TV ratings.  When Indycar originally announced it’s move to Versus it made a lot of sense.  It might hurt a bit in the short term but ESPN’s coverage of Indycar was pathetic.  Surely putting it on Versus would pay off, right?  But things got off to a rough start with a .3 at St. Pete in 2009 and have not shown much improvement.   With new cars and engines it vital that Indycar’s teams sign more sponsors over the off season.  With ratings like this… how exactly is that suppose to happen?

I honestly do not understand why ratings are so low.  The NASCAR Nationwide series pulls between a 1.2 and 2.0 on ESPN/ABC and it’s pretty much the Kyle Busch show.  Camping World Trucks on Speed regularly get between .6 and .8, or over double what Indycar get’s on Versus.  The Grand Am series is able to equal Indycar on Speed!  Versus get’s a lot of the blame for the poor racing but I’m not sure that’s fair.  After all the NHL, WEC Cage Fighting, Tour De France, AND Professional Bull Riders (Bernard’s last job) all get very strong ratings on Versus.  PBR is not a mainstream sport at all but it still manages to get over 1.0 ratings on their events.  It’s not completley Versus fault Indycar can’t get a decent TV rating.

Ride Buyer's are the only people who benefit from low ratings

Some people say it’ll just take time for ratings to grow, but does Indycar have time?  Unlike PBR, WEC, NHL, or most other sports, racing require TV ratings because they must sign sponsors to compete, and need a fair amount of money to be competitive.  Without TV ratings how are teams suppose to sign sponsors? Without sponsors how are teams going to fund themselves?  What is happening so far is that teams are signing random International Ride Buyers that fans could care less about.  That in turns makes the series less attractive to fans and thus makes growing the ratings even harder.  Where as PBR or NHL could survive with poor ratings and not have it affect their competition, it DIRECTLY affects the competition in Indycar.  Alex Tagliani has won two poles for Sam Schmitt (a team he helped build,  by the way) and he may not have a ride past Edmonton. The freaking Indy 500 winner does not have a ride, and almost half of the drivers who made the Fast Nine at Indy also are not full time.  I guarantee if ratings were better this would not happen.  The longer Indycar goes without good TV ratings the worse things are going to get and with the new cars coming next year teams have got to get more sponsors.

Camping World Trucks have over twice the fans that Indycar has, at least on TV

How to grow the ratings is the million dollar question.  And honestly I don’t know the answer.  I really thought the Texas race, after an exciting Indy 500 would see a nice ratings bump and it didn’t.  That scares me.  Some how or another Indycar has got to get more people watching their races on TV.  The most availible audience is NASCAR fans, as demonstrated by their third tier series having twice the TV ratings as Indycar.  But it’s hard to get them to look away from NASCAR.  Indycar fits as an “extreme sport” and that would be an effective way to get younger fans involved but it’s hard to market Dario Franchitti, Mike Conway, or Scott Dixon as extreme in any way, shape, or form.  The best course of action is to try and attract current racing fans, NASCAR, Sports Car, Motorcycle, and F1.  That would improve ratings and attendance on all the tracks.  At the same time start to develop new fanbases as an “extreme sport” and try and make it more inclusive than NASCAR.  Actually accomplishing this is where Indycar is struggling, and how to accomplish this would require a small novel’s worth of blog posts and would bring up all the controversial debates (re: exciting racing, ovals/road courses, American drivers, ect.) that are not the point of this article.

The NBC/Comcast merger could still pay off.   If they can get more races on either NBC or USA Network it might pay off and get ratings high enough to attract sponsors.  If that’s the case they have got to get the announcement out before next year starts so that teams can attempt to sell it to sponsors over the off season or I shudder to think what the car count might look like next year, or the amount of ride buyers in the field.  ESPN/ABC has better racing but the quality of the coverage is so poor it’s hard to imagine it attracting new fans.  But the longer it takes to see improvement the harder growing the series is.

If Danica could just win a few races Indycar's Ratings would grow very fast. But A. she needs to win multiple times and B. that means she can't go to NASCAR. Neither of those are looking likely...

I don’t have all the answers to Indycar’s problem.  But after 3 years still not being able to consistently (or ever?) get ratings equal to the Camping World Trucks series is a serious issue.  In the dark ages of the IRL on ESPN Indycar could reliably get a .8 through 1 point something where as the Unified series has not been able to consistently get a .4 ratings point.  Fixing this has got to happen and unfortunetly it’s got to happen fast.  Otherwise the quality of the drivers and series is going to plummet.  Especially with the new cars coming.  These cars CANNOT be delayed again but at the same time they are going to cost more money, and that put’s Indycar in horrible position.  I don’ really understand why ratings are so low on Versus, but whatever the reason, someone has got to find a solution, and find it soon.