TBK-Light.com

I predict it won't get better... Period. There are WAY too many cooks in the kitchen. The only way to fix it, is to start from scratch, which they can't do as long as the IMS board is in place, which it will always be because Indycar needs the Speedway a lot more than the Speedway really needs Indycar. But since IMS owns the series, they'll never just disolve it and run the 500 as a stand alone because they don't have to, so there is really no incentive to fix the problems. Besides, the only guy that's shown the ability to do anything positive in the last 15 years just got thrown out on his ass.

What would be awesome, and send a clear message, is if Penske, Ganassi and Andretti pulled the plug on their Indycar operations and went Sportcar racing. But, since they probably instigated a lot of this, that won't happen either.

They're (Indycar) fucked. Sponsors will leave, smaller teams will leave, tracks will leave at the end of the contracts, etc. People, especially the ones spending the money, like to know that there's some stability. There is none of that now and regardless of who's put in charge, it's clear that they can be removed on a whim, so there will be no stability going forward.

For that reason, the best thing that can happen to AOWR at this point is a deal with the NASCAR group where they get major control while the Hulman family gets a satisfying financial cut. Yes, sponsors are a problem in NASCAR too but if I were a sponsor, I'd have almost no problem jumping onboard a series backed by NASCAR than the way Indycar is being run now. If the series and more importantly IMS becomes a part of them (NASCAR), it will be in their best interest to nurture the series rather than kill it because they will know that the audiences for open-wheel and stock cars are different and alienating them in the hope that they will be forced to watch NASCAR won't really benefit them as much as giving them a better product than the misfits at 16th and Georgetown have been able to do in so many years. For all the criticisms levied upon NASCAR, they know how to run a series better than anyone. Sure some might say they dumb things down to create more parity and a better 'show' but AOWR could not get any more dumbed down anyway. And I don't think they will dumb it down. Like I said, they know it's a different audience to stock car fans and that they prefer a bit more open playing field and focus on technology as opposed to a high level of parity.

I don't see NASCAR ever having the best intentions for IndyCar at any point.

13 Years ago we lost Greg Moore.

And I remember it like it was yesterday.

Yeaa, it really doesn't feel like it was that long ago.

Indeed, still remember that terrible shot on tv...

Up until Dan's, Greg's was the worse I ever saw. Didn't help that he was my favorite driver. Never really picked a favorite since.

I'll always remember Greg's second ever win...at Detroit in 1997.

He was awesome in his first ever CART race at Homestead in 1996 too.

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If you screw up while skydiving, you have the rest of your life to figure out how to fix it.

Well... that certainly was an interesting read, paints Bernard in a different picture

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"An idea whose time has come cannot be stopped by any army or any government"


3x TBKL rFactor Hillclimb champion

It does but at the same time, it also shows that the owners have way too much clout in just about every area you can think of. A series cannot run like that. There will always be times when you have to swallow something you don't like and move on without conspiring a future payback plan. Otherwise you get nowhere as a group.

The owners wanted cheaper parts but increasingly expensive tires from Firestone were okay rather than cheaper Continental tires?

One of the quotes sounds just like Penske (the one saying we'll go to Belskus on page 3).

I don't think it was that different to be honest. Maybe to those who suddenly got the idea that Randy Bernard was a CEO god, but realistically Bernard has had struggles and hasn't been perfect.

What it does also reinforce is the "too many cooks" comment and that the car owners have many complaints and squabbles, but no vision to drive future success. So the series is indeed fucked, carry on.

All that article proves is the overall problem with Indycar. A CEO answers solely to the Boad of Directors. Having Randy have to deal directly with the teams was complete folly. That's what the Competition Director, Race Director, Marketing, etc. are for. Those company officers submit reports to both the CEO and the board, the CEO makes policy and the board either approves it or does not. From that point on, the teams only choice is either to accept that or not. Race, or don't race.

The CEO of any company does not report directly to the shareholders. He reports to the board. The shareholders decide whether or not they want to keep their shares, buy more, or sell them off based on what the board of directors and the CEO's policies are.

This is really quite simple. If the teams didn't like the policies being laid down by the CEO, and for a while being backed by the IMS board, then they should have left their cars on the haulers. Real easy way to get everyones attention.

What they did was bullshit. Not that Randy was clean, but the teams were really in the wrong. It's not the CEO's job to deal with driver safety or concerns, that's for the Competition and Race Directors. The CEO's job is to manage the overall health of the series/company, which someone should tell the owners and drivers is the SHOW... Dumbasses.

Indeed. Bernard never had an easy job or a long leash, like Pruett said. Once the team owners decided to take the route of getting Randy fired, it was always going to be a big mess. Too many cooks. From what I can understand is that teams were blaming Randy for things he wasn't solely responsible if at all.

For example, blaming Randy for expensive parts is quite ridiculous. Someone made a contract with a vendor, a buyer for the series. They made a deal of supplying the series. They had the price tag at 100 when the deal was sealed for certain amount of parts delivered in given time frame. If the teams then goes around with different time frame and different amount of parts than originally planned, the price tag is going to change if/when there's a point in a contract that the vendor can do so. And guess what, raw material prices could increase from the original contract date. Of course the buyer and customers (the team owners) are unhappy when the price tag is saying 150 instead of what they imagined.

Sure they then want their supervisor (Randy) to say his word to the vendor. But the vendor needs to make profit too. See what happened to Lola Cars, they went bust. So the vendor is not usually very keen to lower the price under the comfortable level. Which goes back to the contract the vendor and the buyer has made. The vendor can say that they're allowed to raise the price if there's a reason for it. The buyer and Randy would then try to negotiate on it. But with suppliers like Dallara, it's going to be a "take it or leave it" kind of negotiation. There's not much any CEO can do on it if they need something from that vendor. At least you don't want to push that kind of vendor around and piss them off. You have to take those expensive front wings from Dallara because there's no other option apart from not having a front wing or a car at all. And you can't change the rules on this kind of matter in a heart beat, it's a way longer process.

So then Randy comes up with an idea of changing a vendor that has indicated that they're not very interested to stay with the series. And he finds Continental Tires who would be more than happy to make a deal with lower price. So here's a place where you can cut the costs that the other vendor with expensive front wings are causing. But instead of being happy, teams and drivers went insane, claiming (without any proof at all) that the new vendor cannot be trusted and neither can the CEO for suggesting such.

In the end the team owners got too much of power and Randy was fired. The problem was that the IMS Board didn't take a step at any point to be supportive to Randy and his actions. Or at least we didn't see that. When the teams in F1 attacked Bernie over new Concorde agreement (happens every time actually), the FOM never judges Bernie for what he's doing. Randy and Bernie are there to work for the best interest of the series and it's owners, never for the teams as the teams are nothing but the workers for the series that try to make their living there.

A worker can moan about what his boss is doing or say that the workers are not paid good enough. Workers tend to do so all around the world. They always want more money and they want to do less for it. The boss and middle men are there to keep things running for the owners' best interest. The boss can try to make things better for the workers to a certain point. The biggest problem in American Open-wheel racing is that the workers have been allowed to call the shots for themselves for a too long time. They have started their own series, they have plotted against many CEOs, they have fired people and in the end they have went bust because of the chaos they have brought on themselves with their short sighted actions. And for all this time the IMS governing body has let this happen. And for all this time mr. Ecclestone has been the man to call the shots for the F1. The workes have moaned in F1, but the governing body has always stand behind Bernie. AOWR has literally make their own life miserable with having no control over their staff's short sighted attempts to cash out a little bit more. And at the same time F1 with strict control has made huge profit in long term, not only for the governing body, not only for the boss and the middlemen, but also for the workers.

Firing Randy is just another example that AOWR is not healthy at the moment and it's not going to get better as the same old mistakes are repeated over and over again and again. The chaos and misery are getting worse again and the board has no control. If the IMS board did know what they're doing, they had named a new CEO in a next phrase after saying that Bernard is stepping down. Firing him for his mistakes is of course reasonable. Firing him over someone elses mistakes is unfair. Not having a better replacement is non-sense. Not having a replacement at all is lunacy.

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"Indy doesn't give you a second chance. You have to earn it."

Jeff Belskus responds to the hatemail flooding his inbox;

http://www.indycar.com/en/News/2012/11- ... ff-Belskus

I'll leave it to other people to question the sincerity of the letter, but I have one question regarding the positives about 2013;



Weren't all of those things Randy's doing?

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Dan Wheldon ¦ 1978-2011
Marco Simoncelli ¦ 1987-2011
Jules Bianchi ¦ 1989-2015
Justin Wilson ¦ 1978-2015

Yeah, I know he's mad and I don't care. I do not care. I did not care then. I do not care now. I'm here to race him.

shh

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Ducks Angels Sounders Spurs

http://auto-racing.speedtv.com/article/ ... at-barber/

Good to hear Simona happy with the Chevy engine. The difference must be huge after a season with the Lotus engine.

Even if all of the things said in that article are true (and I wouldn't put money on that) the teams still are making 2 major mistakes

1) Believing the power behind the series lies with them and expecting the CEO to be their puppet on a string.

2) Thinking Fucking Tony Fucking George is the answer to any problem except "do you know any good cocaine dealers in the area of 15th and Georgetown?"

Randy wasn't perfect, Vegas was an absolute disgrace tbh, everyone saw it coming, the drivers begged for it not to happen and we lost Dan Wheldon as a result of him chasing a spectacular end of season signature event, but I think even he realised that in the aftermath and pulled himself and the series together at a time leadership was badly needed.

Picking Dallara again after the whole ICONIC farce was a bit stupid too.
They used the Deltawing as a big PR stunt to try to convince people they were trying to think revolutionary but the word of those in the know was that it was always going to be Dallara and the whole thing was just a publicity exercise.
If I was him I would've picked Lola or Swift just to prove they weren't stuck in the old way of doing things and the teams can have some trust in transparency in the series decision making process, but nope, Dallara appears and you begin doubting the agenda behind every decision again.

I'm honestly at the point where I want the whole series to just die so we can press a giant reset button and start again.
Yeah, the new series might have less than A1GP levels of exposure and might never get back to the 90s level in my lifetime, but at least we can clear out all the diseased and dead wood in the series and start again fresh.

The real tragedy of it is, fans are turning off NASCAR this year due to its sucky racing and Indycar's races were actually markedly better with the new car so they had a chance to steal a bit of a march on it just by quality of on-track product, but instead of trying to capitalise on that and marketing itself and the best racing in America, they squander it with PR disasters such as this.

Fuck off and die, Indycar.

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RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley