I used to follow F1, but the cars got muffled down, they took away the screaming V12 engines, and the cost to run a team skyrocketed due to all the crazy technology. I like em loud and fast, and Indycar just seems so much better because it’s pure racing, w/o all the politics and bickering that goes on in F1.
Now that I am no longer a flag marshal, I don’t follow either as closely as I used to. But I do find IndyCar more audience friendly than F1 and I still know some of the people involved. Yep, friends down at St. Pete this weekend and others watching it closely. Me I don’t have time watch because I’m moving soon so I’ve asked friends to let me know their highlights, rather than the standard audience highlights.
It’s just so much more fun to be at the race, and working it, than to just watch it on TV. There is so much going on that you don’t hear about. And, even as a participant, there is so much going on that you don’t hear about right away but maybe in the evening or the next morning. IndyCar is more exciting for workers because there is so much going on all day. F1 has more pomp and circumstance that can be boring for those of us who have to look good for a possible camera wide angle, holding a position for 90 minutes before the cars are even brought out on the track makes F1 much duller than IndyCar which doesn’t drag the pomp on for ages before the engines start.
But I’ll always love F1 cars for the sheer ability to do things that IndyCar doesn’t because of the cost factor. I’ll always remember the ridiculous, truly ear-splitting scream of the normally aspirated Ferrari engines, while everybody else was running the last allowed year with their turbos.
I have awesome memories of both series. And of sportscar series as well. I’m lucky to have flagged so many fabulous events and worked with awesome people. Watching it on TV, though? Not so much unless I am alongside fellow racing enthusiasts while watching.
Thanks for moving it to the right place. My first post. If you could make the “of” into “or” in the title it would be correct then.
PM a moderator to fix your title.
Just say that your OP is in Dutch. Then it’s fine.
(‘of’ is Dutch for ‘or’)
The V10s were the screaming banshees since the late 90s until 2005. Then it was V8s, which still screamed, but as great sounding as the V10s. 2014 they moved to the current v6 turbo hybrids. Yeah, they don’t sound nearly as exciting, but they are now the most powerful race engines that have ever been. And yeah,the car are way heavier/bigger than ever too, but they are the fastest (at least in 2018/19/20) and safest than they have ever been.
And as for the budgets, it was damn near half a billion a year back in the mid 2000’s!. They have since come way down. There’s now a budget cap of something like 120 million, tho that doesn’t include driver salaries and such. And yeah, it’s still 5 or 6 times that of an indycar budget, but Indy cars are only as fast as F2. However, I still enjoy indycar races when I see them. But I just don’t follow it.
I started out as a big fan of IndyCar (well, Champ Car at the time). I followed the series very closely and went to lots of races. A year or two after becoming an IndyCar fan in the early 1990s, I started watching F1, too, but at the time I felt it was too boring, a parade series where Michael Schumacher won every race from the pole. (I’ve never been to an F1 race in person.)
But over time I have migrated more and more to F1, and for the last decade I’ve only followed IndyCar perfunctorily. I watch the 500 religiously, but if I miss one of the regular races it doesn’t bother me much.
I think the main part of this has to do with identifying with the drivers. I liked many of the IndyCar drivers from my early days, Mario, Bobby Rahal (both of whom I met in person), Roberto Moreno, Tony Kanaan, etc. But in the current crop there aren’t many I feel any connection with. Of course, it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy, since the less I watch, the less chance I have of getting to know the new guys.
But there’s also only so much time, and following one series is sometimes a challenge. Most of my TV watching time now is with my wife, who is not a race fan. She’ll watch the 500 or Monaco with me, but I have to sneak the rest in when she’s not around or doing something else.
When I was a fleet manager back in the 80s I toured a couple of F1 factories. McLaren was the most interesting and one of their engineers was showing us around.
As an example of how expensive these cars are, he held up a throttle pedal, made of titanium and told that even such a simple part cost £hundreds. He also told us that the advertisers pay for it all. In those days it was Benetton since Camel had been outlawed and it will have cost them £millions. You need deep pockets to get even a small label on the car.
This. of course, is why it’s so hard for any newcomer to get started.
Been watching F1 for over 40 years. Only missed one or two races in that time (Believe me, this has lead to some scheduling conflicts, to say the least…). I’ll admit, it’s gotten pretty bland lately compared to “The Good Old Days”. But its The Best of The Best. I like that the teams and cars are different. Watching who can come up with what and stay within the rules to get an advantage, then watch every other team struggle to catch up. I try to avoid the off-track drama, off-season nonsense and pre-race bullshit as much as possible. The “Grid Walk” is especially cringe-worthy. Not a big fan of the DRS crap, but it does seem to inject a little excitement to the racing, if only manufactured.
Indy is okay, as long as it’s a road course. Ovals do nothing for me. Basically a pit-stop competition. in my opinion, and not a very interesting one. The teams and cars all pretty much seem the same except the paint job. I’ll watch a race now and then if there is nothing else to do.
I agree so much. One of the benefits of being one of the flaggers is that we don’t have to put up with that B.S. when working an event. However, F1’s electronic timing took the fun out of flagging the races for me so I don’t work them any more. Now, with health issues and the fact that many of my fellow marshals are scattered across continent, I barely follow it. But I still have my favorites. Glad Alonso did well today.
Indycar holds about one third of their races on ovals, and with a 16 race series that is a fair amount of boring races, versus 23 track or circuit races for F1. So while Indycar can be more competitive, there are just fewer races to watch. I do particularly like the Barber Motorsports track. Indycar is covered by NBC, which just sucks, especially when they cut to commercials during the race (and especially more so when they invite Rutledge Wood to the race). Not to be outdone in the suck division, F1 introduced the Miami race, which is crammed full of suck on a parking lot course.
F1 coverage in the states is provided by Sky Sports, which is far better than NBC coverage. No cut aways for commercials, and the announcers are better except when they add Danica Patrick for the North American races. No idea if it’s true or not, but I suspect she is a cousin of Rutledge Wood. F1 also has 23 races, so you’ll be watching F1 long after Indycar has called it a season.
But F1 is superior simply because they start from the grid. Flying starts at the beginning of a race just seem wrong. Oh, and F1 has sexy safety cars. The Honda Civic at St. Pete’s today was ridiculous, Type R or not.
If Arrow-McLaren Lee Diffy presented by XFinity Penske were fired into the sun, IndyCar coverage would be improved immensely.
I watched the Indycar season opener today, which was also the opening day of F1. No surprise in F1, Verstappen won.
In St Pete, the Indycar race looked like a demolition derby! Not one, but two incidents (crashes) where someone went flying over another car after slamming into them. Thought for sure that Romain Grosjean had the race in the bag and I was pulling for him, but it wasn’t to be.
The cars in both series look “funny” to me, but not ha ha funny. Just plain weird. A few years ago I was living in St Pete, and happened to be downtown while the teams were putting in some practice laps. The noise was awesome, bouncing off the buildings and echoing through the streets. Those cars are LOUD, pretty similar to the old days of F1. It’s good to have race season w/ us again.
Umm, I think you meant to say “most powerful F1 engines that have ever been”.
Of course, if you run a Top Fuel engine wide open for 6 seconds, they’ll die. Usually that will happen in a spectacular fashion.
If you meant the fastest racing engines that make turns, I still think that some prototype sports car engines have eclipsed the current F1 numbers. But they are generally pushing a lot more air, so not really a fair comparison. Even then, a turbo era F1 car in qualifying tune could probably match the current engine.
I used to watch Indycar (mostly CART era and previous, actually), but after they started to restrict the engines to particular manufacturers, I kind of lost interest. I still follow F1, but don’t watch as many races as I used to. I’m more of a sports car fan than an open wheel fan, at this point. I’ll watch a single make sports car series with glee. I’m not sure why that interest doesn’t follow over to open wheel stuff - most of the time. I’ll still watch Formula Vee races for hours if I’m in the mood.
Of course I meant that. We were talking about F1. And I was talking about F1.
Mad respect to top fuel though. That’s awesome in a whole different way. Each pass feels like you’ve just been carpet bombed by a B52.
I specifically said race engin s, which the massive turbo F1 engines back in the 80s didn’t have. Tho their qualy engine were insane. Even then, though, qualy lap times today are a dozen or so seconds faster now than back then.
Well, we are talking about Indy Cars, as well. So, “race” is ambiguous in this setting.
Yeah, but again “race” is a little ambiguous here. Had the two letters “F1” preceded the word, I wouldn’t have had a nitpick.
Oh yeah, which is pretty much a statement of how much better the tires are in this era (even though everyone complains about them). Let’s face it, 80s tires were a joke by comparison.
There’s no comparison between a turbo engine and the NA V10s in F1 from the early 2000’s as far as loudness. Turbo’d engines are inherently quieter. As proof, you can hear the tires screech as they rip out of the pits or when they lock up into a braking zone. You couldn’t hear any of that in the NA days of F1.
Yes. As well as Flintstones-like aerodynamics. Plus many other technological improvements in pretty much everything.
Oh yeah, even just the depth of monitoring. The knowledge into what the different parts of a F1 car is doing is pretty amazing these days. They’ll usually have a driver stop before an engine destroys itself, for an extreme example.