Q: It definitely feels like the level of mainstream draw for American prototype racing is something new and special. On Black Friday, my wife and I saw stacks of Cadillac V-Series.R remote control cars displayed prominently in the middle of Target. Came back to the store later that week and they were all sold, except for a couple still on the shelf in the toy aisle. This made me realize how much room for improvement IndyCar has in the merchandise industry. Do you know of any plans for IndyCar to try to get their products in big box stores across the country? Feels like a huge missed opportunity, especially considering NASCAR and F1 are in these stores.
Pat McAssey
MP: I hear, on occasion, from acquaintances who want to do something with IndyCar that involves licensing or merchandising, and the costs to do so have been described as showstoppers. I don’t know if that’s the reason behind this, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head.
Q: I loved the photo of Karl Kempf’s telemetry computer system in the Mailbag last week.
I had the honor of working on a project in the early 1990s for him related to an artificially intelligent short interval factory scheduling when I was a young engineer and were both at Intel. I knew he had worked in F1, but I had no idea the pioneering role he played.
Do you have anything else you can share about his role or point me to other reading material about it?
[Unsigned, via email]
MARK GLENDENNING: It’s a cool shot, isn’t it? I found that one by accident. Through desperation to avoid running nine pages of photos about Honda and IndyCar, I started messing around with different keywords in our image agency’s search box and one of them led to that.
Unfortunately I don’t have much additional information about Kempf’s motorsport career, other than that he worked for Goodyear before moving to Tyrrell, and also spent time at Ferrari. But I can offer you a shot of him firing up the data system on Ronnie Peterson’s Tyrrell P34 during testing at Silverstone in 1977 (below). Don’t know about you, but this is definitely the first photo I’ve ever seen of someone inserting a cassette tape into a Formula 1 car.
Q: I was one of those Thursday ticket holders to Free Practice 1 and 2 at the Grand Prix of Las Vegas. I worked a half-day and drove the five hours or so to my hotel that was less than a mile from the T-Mobile zone by the Sphere. I paid $268 or so after tax and resort fees for my hotel, and about $262 for my $215 ticket and tax and fees. Waited about 10-15 minutes to get into the venue due to fans being searched upon entry.
By the time I made it in, FP1 was already canceled. Not much info was given to the fans, so we were left in the cold not wondering what was going on. Confusion came sometime after 1am when it was announced that all fan areas would be closed at 1am. Some workers said that the food/drink/merchandise vendors would close but we could still watch from our seats. Then police started clearing out the stands. Other rumors were that we would be allowed back on Friday (not sure how that would happen since those seats were for Friday attendees) due to the somewhat ambiguous statement on the big screens, “We look forward to welcoming fans back later today…” The $200 voucher was just a slap in the face to someone like me who wasted all that time and money to attend Thursday.
Reginald Legaspi
CHRIS MEDLAND: I really feel for you, as I felt the situation was really badly handled at the time and said as much on Twitter/X. I’ll admit that I have a bit more understanding of the lack of an apology given the threat of a lawsuit (that came anyway) but it really did feel like there was very little actual care for the fans who had been left without anything to watch.
Even moreso in cases like yours where people stuck it out in the cold and were poorly informed about what was going on. Even in the paddock, I only found out they were closing the grandstands from a tannoy announcement that came a few minutes before the cut-off time.
I get that it was a hugely expensive undertaking to put the race on, but a straight refund to anyone with Thursday tickets should have been the absolute minimum offer, because as you highlight, there’s much more to the outlay than just the ticket. At the very least F1 might have missed out on some potential new fans who had that experience, but it could also have cost it some existing fans, too.
Q: I was watching a video of Pato O’Ward in Abu Dhabi being tested on his ability to jump out of an F1 car under 7.0s and to re-attach his wheel to an F1 car under 5.0s. The first makes sense to me, being able to get out of a car quickly after an accident, but why do drivers need to be tested on how quickly they can re-attach their wheel to the car?
Debbie
CM: The re-attachment is to allow the car to be moved as quickly as possible if needed. Without the wheel, marshals will be fully reliant on a crane or truck to come and lift the car, and they’re not always readily available in the location a car may stop, so the wheel is important. The speed, I believe, is just so that wheels conform to quick release and re-attachment regulations, and the easiest way of doing that was to instill it within the procedure.