Zooming into its fourth season since Red Bull came into the series, upstart motorsports series Red Bull Global Rallycross kicked off its 2016 campaign two weeks ago with yet another new manufacturer, Honda, and a new way for viewers to consume the sport. Series CEO Colin Dyne talks about Global Rallycross’ deal to go over the top with Red Bull TV, the energy drink’s 24/7 online streaming network, on top of continuing to have its races aired on NBC’s broadcast network.
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Our cars are stock bodies — the race car is built from the inside out. You can go buy the Ford Fiesta or Volkswagen or new Honda. You can put a body kit on it and make it look like a GRC car. I think there’s a lot of relevance there.”
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Photo by: RED BULL GLOBAL RALLYCROSS
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On how GRC is doing relative to the competition in motorsports: The thing about IndyCar is the cars don’t relate to what people are driving, and it’s just a different animal as far as the audience goes. It’s an older audience; it’s people my age who were really big into IndyCar in the ’90s, and the cars were more exciting back then and we stayed IndyCar fans. I think NASCAR’s challenges come from various different places: The races being too long. To have to get the attention of an 18- to 40-year-old for three to four hours is very difficult.
Is GRC in talks with other manufacturers about joining Volkswagen, Ford, Subaru and Honda? We’re currently talking to two or three others — the first two are more serious than the third one — for 2017. I think we’re well-positioned to bring in at least one or two manufacturers [for 2017]. One’s a domestic, one’s an international. I’ve been talking to one of them for about a year and a half, so I think it’s feasible [to at least bring in one new one by next year].
On why the series is going over the top: It’s just a huge opportunity to get our product live — live or on video-on-demand if you want to watch it the next morning. Red Bull obviously have a tremendous amount of people who visit their apps and sites; later in the year, they’re going to be putting promotion behind it to relaunch the whole Red Bull TV platform. But based on the fact that we have this young demo, our social numbers are strong, we have people that are tweeting or Instagram-ing while the race is going on — I think it should be pretty good coming out the gate with it. It will start to promote itself. They’re going to have a 24/7 channel, so they need content, and live and good content.
On where GRC may look to race at next: New locations for 2017, I have 25 RFPs going out. I can’t tell you right now what’s hot, what’s not, but there are some pretty exciting places in there. There will be a couple international in there as well. Possibly a Pacific/Asia loop, maybe Australia and Asia. Financially, those [international] deals are particularly pretty good deals. But it helps our manufacturers who sell cars many different places.
