F1 2015

Basil,

You hit it on the head. It's the same reason Miller never made any money. Outside F1 and MotoGP, the rest of the races that they bring there are not travel to series for the most part. Sure for WEC you will get some out of towners but not a lot. PWC and Tudor has enough local enough stops that people don't need to travel for them.

Anyways, If Jason was suppose to be a marketing guru then damn....oh well.

They pull some track days and a decent amount of corp. days. Chin and Driver's edge regularly do track days there. It's not the exclusive playground it once was.

etifosi wrote: OHMYGOD.....Suzie Wolff is retiring! And here I thought silly season was over already.

Forget squabbling over tracks, let's get back to Suzie for moment. Nice find Mt. etifosi We don't often agree on much F1 related, but we certainly see eye to eye here

Again. Excellent race in Mexico.

Must be weird to have so much power with so little downforce on a track that rewards great low drag downforce.

Impressed that Williams got on the podium.

The Mexican fans showed up all the world in praising the winner instead of the foolish jeers and boos of other fans. Everyone got a happy response as sportsmen should.

Some reports out there that Renault is OK to supply RedBull for 2016.

I think Redbull leaders just showed themselves to be very poor to work with. I was hoping they would fall apart and maybe reform under some other owners. I don't know how Mr Ginger Spice can lead the FOM or FIA as he used to be in the running. But F1 is full of insane decisions.

Torro Rosso may still go Ferrari way.

Brazil GP maybe another wet race this weekend.

In reply to Advan046:

If Torro Rosso ends up being owned by some super rich Italian person instead of Red Bull, I would be fine with that. I'm getting tired of Red Bull, and their antics. F1 was here before you were, and will survive if you leave. I almost think that one reason TR didn't get a Ferrari motor is that it would demonstrate some of the bad long term decisions and actions that RB has taken with the main team and Renault.

alfadriver wrote: If Torro Rosso ends up being owned by some super rich Italian person instead of Red Bull, I would be fine with that. I'm getting tired of Red Bull, and their antics. F1 was here before you were, and will survive if you leave. I almost think that one reason TR didn't get a Ferrari motor is that it would demonstrate some of the bad long term decisions and actions that RB has taken with the main team and Renault.

Agree 100%.

More bad news for COTA. The State of Texas is reneging on the amount of funds they are providing from an economic development fund to support the track. The amounts are determined by taking a percentage of the incremental increased sales tax revenues realized by staging an event. For example, the Superbowl got a big amount of money from this fund due to the increased economic activity and sales tax revenue created when it was held in Houston.

This is another $6 million dollar hit that the track is going to take on top of a weather-ravaged F1 race that had already wreaked havoc on its revenues. Part of the problem is the way F1 deals with the tracks. F1 charges a sanctioning fee and then takes ALL the sponsorship and TV revenues. All the track gets is the gate revenues that are supposed to pay for the sanctioning fee (~$25MM) plus the operating expenses of the track. That's why spectator fees are so high. They would have to increase even more to take up the gap that the state has now created.

Another interesting twist is that apparently Tavo Hellmund was behind the creating the Mexico race. Tavo was pushed out of the COTA deal early on and it looks like he is doing his best to undermine his former partners by promoting a competing race.

Not really a new situation. Indianapolis spent a billion or two, and only got 3 or 4 years out of Bernie, I'm sure all the street tracks over the years required a huge government cash infusion. The Montreal GP would never survive if it were anywhere other than Quebec. The European tracks can't pony up the dough like the middle east and Asia, so there go the races.

I don't know if it matters or not, in the greater scheme of things. I watch them on TV anyway, and the Euro races are too darn early in the morning. The Aisan ones, I can just stay up late.

Button pokes fun at Hamilton:

https://streamable.com/yrgh

MCarp22 wrote: Button pokes fun at Hamilton: https://streamable.com/yrgh

driving into a parked car is pretty funny.....

Streetwiseguy wrote: Not really a new situation. Indianapolis spent a billion or two, and only got 3 or 4 years out of Bernie, I'm sure all the street tracks over the years required a huge government cash infusion. The Montreal GP would never survive if it were anywhere other than Quebec. The European tracks can't pony up the dough like the middle east and Asia, so there go the races. I don't know if it matters or not, in the greater scheme of things. I watch them on TV anyway, and the Euro races are too darn early in the morning. The Aisan ones, I can just stay up late.

It was in Indy for 8 years, actually (I was there for all of them), but your point stands. Bernie is so intent on squeezing every penny out of the tracks and promoters, the only ones that can afford to do it are the ones that are subsidized. That's part of how the sport is losing it's soul.

The tough part is the licensing fee increases every year of the contract by 5 million dollars. Combine that with a typically declining or static attendance and it's a recipe for disaster. It was going to be really hard for them to meet the financial obligations without the reduced funding. Now with it, I just don't see how it would be possible. They said that they would have had to sell 30,000 more tickets to fill the $5.5M gap that was created this year. They don't publish numbers but there have been estimates that they lost between $8-12M from this last race weekend.

The instagram messages they have been sending out have the feeling of a wake for a dead race vs. a fight to stay alive.

Basil Exposition wrote: Another interesting twist is that apparently Tavo Hellmund was behind the creating the Mexico race. Tavo was pushed out of the COTA deal early on and it looks like he is doing his best to undermine his former partners by promoting a competing race.

Here's the interesting part- they mentioned during the Mexico coverage that Tavo is trying to get another track in the US for a race. When they said that, I forgot that he was not part of the Austin track anymore. Now that I know that, it's quite interesting that he's trying to do that.

As bad as Bernie/CO is, I'm also tending to think that the team in Austin is not doing a good job.

In reply to MCarp22:

For all of the people who say Fernando is toxic, this season has really shown he's got one heck of a sense of humor.

Then there was the picture of him and Jensen Button on the podium, getting sneaky pictures.

Fred (I like to call him Fred) isn't toxic, he's just the best driver he knows and he feels like he should win all the time. Kind of what you want in a guy you are paying millions of dollars a year to drive your car. He's being a remarkably good sport about having a crap car to deal with this year, but those millions he's being paid probably have something to do with that

Heard a rumor Bernie is shopping around for a place to hold an F1 event in southern California. Hopefully it is just a rumor, especially after New Jersey never even came close to getting off the ground. All these people just give Bernie money in hopes that they can get a race. After seeing what happened at Indy, these people must be stupid. I hope I'm wrong, but I'll be surprised if F1 is still in Austin 5 years down the road. Can't believe so many people get sucked into Bernie's game. OH yeah, Rosberg's on the pole for the fifth straight race. Where was this guy in the first half of the season? Thinking Hamilton's got his championship, so now Mercedes is putting more effort into Nico's performance.

Apparently, after Fernando was told to stop his car during qualifying and failing to register any lap time at all, Mr. Alonso decided to work on his tan. F1 fans have taken the image and had some fun with it.

There's more photos on Facebook at F1 Trolls and News https://www.facebook.com/F1trollsandnews/photos_stream

ncjay wrote: Heard a rumor Bernie is shopping around for a place to hold an F1 event in southern California. Hopefully it is just a rumor, especially after New Jersey never even came close to getting off the ground. All these people just give Bernie money in hopes that they can get a race. After seeing what happened at Indy, these people must be stupid. I hope I'm wrong, but I'll be surprised if F1 is still in Austin 5 years down the road. Can't believe so many people get sucked into Bernie's game. OH yeah, Rosberg's on the pole for the fifth straight race. Where was this guy in the first half of the season? Thinking Hamilton's got his championship, so now Mercedes is putting more effort into Nico's performance.

The drivers have their own separate crews, so it's more likely that either Nico has stepped up his game or Lewis has decided not to take that extra 0.1% of risk.

Bernie is constantly playing games with the race organizers. What happened to NJ?

ncjay wrote: Heard a rumor Bernie is shopping around for a place to hold an F1 event in southern California. Hopefully it is just a rumor, especially after New Jersey never even came close to getting off the ground. All these people just give Bernie money in hopes that they can get a race. After seeing what happened at Indy, these people must be stupid. I hope I'm wrong, but I'll be surprised if F1 is still in Austin 5 years down the road. Can't believe so many people get sucked into Bernie's game. OH yeah, Rosberg's on the pole for the fifth straight race. Where was this guy in the first half of the season? Thinking Hamilton's got his championship, so now Mercedes is putting more effort into Nico's performance.

I'll be surprised if it's there in '17 … wouldn't be at all surprised if it's gone now … no money, no race in '16

not according to some reports I've heard … Hamilton doesn't want anyone (especially his teammate) to win …

Based on the in car footage it looks like part of why Rosberg got pole is because he was taking risks with the curbs. Which was awesome to see. He definitely took a lot of curb at turn 2 and maybe 8 I think it was? More so than all the other guys did based on the footage I saw.

I figure Hamilton will get a tire cut down by Vettel into T1 then Vettel will run down Rosberg and take the lead. At which point Rosberg will make a mistake but there will be a VSC so Rosberg will go from 20 seconds back from Vettel to 2 seconds by the end of VSC Then Rosberg wins.

If that had been Hamilton instead of Alonso doing that, the Lewis haters would be foaming at the mouth.