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IndyCar enjoys positive trends for 2016 season

The Verizon IndyCar Series continued to stabilize this season, finding positives to build on while also encountering enough challenges to underline the work that remains.

The open-wheel series, which wrapped up its season this month at Sonoma Raceway as Team Penske finished 1-2-3 in the standings, saw attendance gains at a number of tracks, brought in seven figures’ worth of new annual sponsorship revenue and pulled off the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500, which drew roughly 350,000 people. IndyCar also provided clarity on the future of its aero kits and announced nine new partners this year with a host of others it hopes to unveil for 2017.

The 100th running of the Indianapolis 500 drew 350,000 people, a highlight of IndyCar’s year.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
“We think it was a great year; we feel very good about it,” said Mark Miles, CEO of Hulman & Co., which owns IndyCar and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and which is shaping up to be profitable this year. “I think it continues a positive trajectory for the series.”

Not everything went perfectly.

The series’ planned new race in Boston, tabbed as a potential highlight of the season, was canceled amid a rancorous, prolonged fallout with the city. Target, the series’ longest-running sponsor, pulled its funding out of Chip Ganassi Racing’s IndyCar program after 27 years. And while viewership was up, it continues to be small relative to NASCAR and the top stick-and-ball sports.

IndyCar averaged 1.278 million viewers in 2016, up 10 percent from 2015 and its best since 2011. The number was less than half that — 488,000 — for NBC Sports Group’s portion of the campaign, but network executives say they’re happy.

“We do everything we can to try to grow that audience … and recognize where some of the challenges are,” said Jon Miller, NBC Sports’ president of programming. “But looking at a world where you don’t see a lot of properties growing in terms of audience, the fact that IndyCar grows year after year kind of validates their strategy and our partnership.”

After averaging 953,000 viewers in 2013, Miles had a goal heading into 2014 of growing IndyCar’s viewership by 50 percent over the next three seasons; the series came a little short of that with a 34 percent increase.

There’s also lingering questions about how the series, which has a strong Midwestern presence, stacks up from a national perspective. Executives around the paddock still mutter privately about the need for more corporate activation — at track, in store and through media. And the 100th running of the Indy 500, while a smashing success in many ways, didn’t appear to have the same impact nationally as it did regionally.

“I loved seeing all those young people down there between turns 3 and 4 [at IMS’s Snake Pit music zone] … that’s where I’ll give IMS, [track President] Doug Boles and IndyCar a lot of credit, because I don’t know that I’ve seen that kind of outreach to universities,” said Jon Flack, president and COO of Just Marketing International, Americas. “So certainly there’s no doubt that it had a big impact locally, regionally. I would have liked to see that it had more impact nationally.”

Closer to home, from a team perspective IndyCar scored points in the paddock with the recent announcement that the series will move to a spec aero kit in 2018 and freeze any research and development for 2017. The aero kits, which were introduced in 2015 as a way for Chevy and Honda to have differentiated cars, have been trouble-filled and exorbitant from the start. Team executives say the move by Jay Frye, IndyCar’s president of competition and operations, will boost their bottom line and should increase the chances of adding a third manufacturer.

“For the most part, the series is trending very positively, and I think Jay and Mark’s group is doing good things — so still optimistic,” said Bobby Rahal, co-owner of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.

Doug Bresnahan, vice president of marketing partnerships for Andretti Autosport, agreed.

“The overall health is definitely positive; there are certainly areas for improvement,” Bresnahan said. “We all have to do our part to elevate those television viewership numbers. … Going forward, IndyCar’s going to focus on that, of course, but also try to round out the schedule with some new markets.”

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