Q: “The Thermal Club has shared its plans to sell tickets for March’s three-day NTT IndyCar Series test and its $1 Million Challenge all-star race at its private road course located on the outskirts of Palm Springs, California, for $2000 a ticket.”
Really?!? Do you think you’re F1 in Vegas? Thermal Club — you might get your 5,000 people, but you’re giving the finger to all IndyCar fans in SoCal and the surrounding areas. What a joke. Why don’t you offer a lottery for two tickets for $300 each? Go ahead and continue to piss off your IndyCar fans, Roger. You’re smarter than to allow this to happen. I hope the place is empty!
Joe, SoCal
MP: The track has set the price, so while I’d have loved to see IndyCar step in and try to steer Thermal towards a more friendly price point, this is the choice of the track, not the series, so I can’t blame Penske Entertainment. I also won’t be surprised if this event does a faceplant and fails after one try if the money to pay for it — and continue the event in 2025 and beyond — was dependent upon selling tickets at $2000 a crack.
Q: I know you are likely more than tired of this subject but that doesn’t stop me from piling on.
It’s obvious the Thermal Club members/owners don’t want the average folks there. I’m assuming some “compromise” was made to placate either Penske Entertainment, NBC or both. Regardless, this is a bad look. Does the series not care about the optics?
Only conclusion is “yes.” If I’m wrong just holler at me and I’m good with that. If not, I will seriously rethink where my racing fan ticket money goes to next year.
Mike DeQuardo, Elkhart Lake, WI
MP: Good call; I’d never want my happiness to get in the way of your piling on, Mike. When I spoke with the series when this was announced about tickets being made available to fans, I was told there was a plan to make sure the “most ardent fans” would be taken care of, and at the time of that reporting, there was a request to leave the specifics out about the tickets first being made available to members of the IndyCar Nation, the series’ official fan club.
So, in hindsight, I’m not sure if I interpreted that “most ardent fans” message correctly. Being an idiot, I assumed it meant that like every other IndyCar race, IndyCar Nation members would get some sort of discount on tickets and better access than the average fan. And with that assumption came an assumption the tickets would be something IndyCar Nation members could afford. I’m sure there are a few members who can fork out $2K for access to Thermal, but most of the members I know cannot.
Which led me to wonder if, by “most ardent fans,” they were talking about only the rarest of members who could afford to gain access to the event. So, now, I don’t know what I was being told. When I asked who from the series might comment on the ticket price, I was referred to the track, which makes me think nobody is in a rush to own this turd in the punchbowl.
Q: With rumor that Apple is putting in an offer of $2B for Formula 1, what if any effect will that have on IndyCar’s TV negotiations?
I hear/read grumblings about how bad NBC is, be it for Indycar or IMSA – the IMSA faithful want IMSA.TV in the U.S. and are willing (per social media) to pay anything to get it to replace NBC with its commercials and broadcasters.
The IndyCar fan base seems to have the opposite take — they want it all on network TV, commercial-free, and with different broadcasters, and even a nickel is too much for Peacock. I’m not in either camp. I’m delighted we get IndyCar and IMSA on Peacock and that we have the level of coverage we have. Are there areas for improvement? Of course. Would I like Georgia to get a shot at taking Marty’s spot on pit road? Yes, I vote for Kevin, Dillon, and Georgia. Or Hanna, to save NBC some travel expenses.
Doug, Illinois
MP: I’ve heard the same about Apple+ and F1. Lord, I really hope they don’t spend that kind of money. I’ve loved F1 since the late 1970s, and I’m happy to have seen its popularity explode in recent years, but this crazy bubble is going to burst in the coming years, and it won’t be pretty. There’s no way this level of cost to attend some of the worst racing on the planet can survive, and while there’s joy in rooting for your favorite team or driver, ratings will suffer if the races are one-sided affairs. If Max and Red Bull run the table again in 2024, this fad will pass, which would be a heck of a thing for Apple to be stuck with at that price point.
On the NBC side, most of the complaints I see are related to commercials, which is another F1 thing that has spoiled a lot of folks. If it’s a domestic racing series, it has commercials, and despite the early days of streaming on Peacock where there were either no or few commercials, that too has changed, so the complaints continue.
As I see it, the commercials thing comes down to your age, location, and when you started following the sport. I’ve only ever known racing to be televised with commercials, so while I don’t love them, their presence isn’t a surprise or a deal breaker. For those who’ve grown up in places outside the U.S. where commercial-free sports are the norm, seeing them here is a travesty, and for those who are newer to racing and have been fortunate to come in when F1 moved to ESPN as a commercial-free property, it must make what’s seen elsewhere with lots of commercials seem like the Stone Age vs Space Age.
I like your pit lane roster. Georgia’s a perfect fit for IndyCar, and Hanna’s done a great job in the nothing-but-inside-baseball series known as IMSA and made her WeatherTech Championship TV hits look like she’s been doing them for a decade. Marty’s struck me as someone who is long overdue for a permanent move to the booth.