I haven’t followed auto racing outside of NASCAR for many years. What exactly happened to make the Indianapolis 500 a minor event in sports? Was it the rise of NASCAR?
I wouldn’t say it’s a minor event. At least, no more minor than other one-time events like the Kentucky Derby. I agree, NASCAR is far more popular but I know an awful lot of people who will still watch Indy even if they don’t watch any other auto racing. I think one of the things that really hurt in this country was the open-wheel splitting into IRL and CART. I can’t name a single CART race and the only IRL race I can name is indeed Indy. Compared to knowing several NASCAR races and tracks off the top of my head–Daytona, Talladega, Pocono, and Martinsville for instance.
I think a similar question could be asked about why F1 isn’t more popular in the US.
I would say it’s a combination of:
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The rise in popularity of NASCAR. I would think a good portion of young talent is more attracted to NASCAR these days. I might be mixed up on this, but I thought in the movie “Days of Thunder” that Tom Cruise’s character’s dream was to race at Indy. NASCAR was a stepping stone. That’s clearly not the case a few years later. Furthermore, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway got a NASCAR race, so people don’t have to watch the 500 to see racing on a 2.5 mile track.
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The IRL / CART split hurt open wheel in the US bad. The talent pool is diluted.
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Tobacco sponsorship restrictions might be a factor.
NASCAR had something to do with it, but in addition to the IRL/CART split, I think the relative lack of contending American drivers probably has hurt as well. Taking nothing away from the Castroneveses and Franchittis of the open-wheel world but it was larger-than-life characters (born in the USA) like A.J. Foyt and the Unsers who helped to pack in the crowds and generate interest. Most of those guys retired a few years before the split so I think the decline started then. Most American oval racers now gravitate towards NASCAR, for whatever reasons-kind of a chicken-and-egg thing. In the 1970’s I think people like Jeff Gordon (native Indianian) would have definitely been driving the Indy cars, but not now.
Maybe I have a different perspective since I live in Indy, but it has always been a big deal and will always be a big deal. For those of us who work in the hospitality industry and entertainment industry this is the biggest money season of the year. We really rake it in all month. So I say, yay for the race, and please come visit our wonderful city! 
It’s still a big deal. It is still the largest one day crowd at any sporting event in the world. I think the biggest difference is that in the 80s, all the well known drivers (Andretti, Unser, etc) were at Indy, and it was the biggest event, so everyone made a huge deal of it, moreso than they do now.
Imagine if Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, Kasey Kahne, and the other drivers who came up in open wheel were still racing at Indy…all the main American drivers would be there, and it would still be as large an event.
If you go to it (and it, like the Kentucky Derby, is a sporting even that everyone should go to at least once in their life), you will see how big of a deal it is.
IN PERSON, it is still a larger event than the Daytona 500…the Daytona 500 is a larger event overall now(with TV included), but as far as the “spectacle” of the event, nothing compares to Indy.
It will be interesting to see how big it gets this year, with 3 women competing, and Danica posting top 3 speeds like she is right now, especially if she continues to do so.
I’ve been to Indy several times when I lived there, the US Grand Prix there, and Daytona since I moved here, and there is really no contest as to what is a bigger event.
While I think the split didn’t exactly help matters, I would dispute that it’s the sole reason.
NASCAR was already making some big gains by the mid-90s, while American open-wheel racing had started to stagnate. You had a bunch of European road course racers and some ride-buyers filling the field, while NASCAR was filled with American drivers.
Personally, I’ve never understood the viewpoint of Champ Car fans that say “Indy is just a race” and that it’s not a big deal. It would be like NASCAR saying the Daytona 500 was just as prestigious as the Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire, or Major League Baseball saying a June series between the Cardinals and Rockies is as important as the World Series.
Do I think that means every decision needs to be made from 16th and Georgetown? No, but at the end of the day you can’t argue that Tony George is doing anything the Frances didn’t do in Daytona.
I also think that racing has become far more class specialised.
Back in the 1960’s you’d get all kinds of drivers trying out the Indy 500, for example Grand Prix drivers such as Jim Clark and Graeme Hill.
You don’t get that cross over from the pinnacles of other racing, Grand Prix (F1 & GP2) is so specialised it does not translate across well, and its not the shop window for talent that it was for this reason.
F1 has tried to make itself more interesting to the US, trying to bring in drivers from NASCAR etc but this has only been partly succesful at best.
This is almost chicken and egg in the sense that as Indy has declined, fewer drivers want to cross over, and with that the international profile of Indy has declined. Its hard to say which came first, the relative decline of Indy, or the reduced interest of drivers from other froms of motor racing, but the two factors correlate.
Winning Indy is not as important as it was, same thing for Le Mans too, you used to get all the top drivers taking part at the peak of their careers, now it seems to be the province of those who can’t get a top class drive in F1 and you get GT drivers who have their own series.
what **girl ** said, but it’s quite true that the split definitely changed the landscape around here.
winning it might not the big deal it once was, but it still generates a major amount of revenue for the city and brings in a whole hell of a lot of people.
it is so totally crazy around here as we get closer to race day, it’s hard to believe. only if you live in indy can you truly appreciate it.
Tony George did it his own damn self. I was there, my dad was running Market Research for IndyCar when it split.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d be really interested in hearing more about what the marketing people knew or thought about the split before it happened.
… sadly, my memory fades. I’ll try to get a story or two the next time I see my dad, but don’t rely on much I say this moment.
That said, I recall it being pretty damn clear that Tony George was doing a power play to take over CART, and wound up… well, ruining his own food. It was pretty clear to everyone what was going to happen. Sure, CART’s board wasn’t all that great, but Tony really wanted to be Bernie. And he wasn’t. So the big name teams went this way, IRL went that way…
Yeah.
Poof.
I don’t know whether any of this is tied to the incident in Charlotte in 1999, but I do know that, partly because of that, IRL is seen by some — at least around here — as insanely unsafe.
That was certainly a tragic incident, but it should be noted that it was the result of an insanely improbable set of circumstances (IIRC, the catch fences had just been raised several feet above their previous height) and in its aftermath many tracks installed even higher catch fences, and most racing series mandated tethers that prevent the wheels from flying off the cars the way that one did. AFAIK, there have been no spectator fatalities in a top racing series since.
Driver and spectator safety have been top concerns of all pro (and amateur) racing series for the last few decades, and fatalities and even serious injuries are far more rare than they were as recently as the early 1980s. In the 1950s and 1960s it was estimated that as many as half of all pro race drivers died behind the wheel!
Here’s an interesting article about racing fatalities among drivers and spectators.
Indygrrl, I don’t know how long you’ve lived in Indy, but I get the impression that you don’t remember how much bigger of a deal it used to be in this city. I went to every 500 from age 6 (1982) until Tony George ruined it (1996, I believe).
The race started to lose its impact when Tony George invited the NASCAR boys to town. Obviously, having two races at the track instead of one diluted the interest somewhat. The 500 still had plenty of prestige, though, until Tony George used it in his power grab. The last straw was when Tony threatened to reserve the top 25 starting slots for drivers who were participating in IRL, leaving only 8 slots for non-IRL drivers. In other words, you could qualify with the fastest time, on pole day, and start 26th, behind 25 slower IRL drivers. Tony never actually implemented that travesty, but the threat was what turned so many people against him and destroyed any hope of an agreement. That was also the day I decided to never go again as long as that bastard owned the track.
Here is a good illustration- I had my own tickets that I kept from year to year. In 1995, the last year before the split, I agreed to sell a couple of extra tickets at the race for a friend who could not attend. I walked up to the first guy I saw holding an “I need tickets” sign and asked for twice their face value. He agreed immediately and handed over the cash. Curious as to why he agreed so quickly, I asked him if he would have given more, and he said that he would have given quite a bit more. And this guy was going to turn around and sell them to someone else for a profit. In 1996, just one year later, I was not going to go but I had already renewed my tickets (you had to renew a week after the race to keep the same seats the next year.) I tried to sell my tickets and could not get rid of them at any price. Finally, I lucked out the day before the race and actually got face value for them; some of my friends could not sell theirs at all or had to settle for less than face.
Nowadays the speedway actually has to advertise tickets on TV, something that would have been inconceivable in the 80s. There used to be no hotels available between Indy and Terre Haute for that weekend, now hotels all over Indy advertise that they have rooms available. In the 80s, it seemed like every single restaurant, bar, and store within a 50 mile radius of Indy had a huge checkered “Welcome Race Fans” banner, now those banners are limited to pretty much Speedway; you may see an odd one here and there around Indy but it is rare.
To be sure, it is still a huge boost for local businesses, as is the Brickyard and the US Grand Prix. But there is no way it is as big as it used to be. Uh-uh. Not even close.