IndyCar says it will continue to seek out new street circuits, but will be more careful moving forward, after this year’s canceled race in Boston.
The sanctioning body two weeks ago reached an agreement with Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey to pay $925,000 out of the roughly $1.7 million that the Labor Day weekend race promoter, Boston Grand Prix, owed to ticket buyers after filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy with nearly $9 million in unpaid debt.
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Long Beach has been the longest-running and most successful street race on the circuit.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
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ndyCar has sued Boston Grand Prix, which in April canceled the race that once was viewed as a coup for the series in its quest to gain a stronger presence in the Northeast. The race was called off amid political turmoil, spiraling overhead costs and mounting red tape, and that litigation continues despite the deal with Healey, who threatened to sue IndyCar if a resolution wasn’t reached.
The Boston incident has sparked widespread chatter throughout the IndyCar paddock that the sanctioning body should stop trying to add new street circuits. IndyCar prides itself on having a diverse schedule split among oval tracks, road courses and street circuits, which are aesthetically pleasing but have proved to be logistically daunting and economically challenging. Other recent canceled street races include one in Baltimore that ended after three years, and a new non-points race that was slated to debut this year in China before eventually being scuttled.
“We’d be foolish if we weren’t concerned about them going forward given some of the obstacles that can be presented,” said Stephen Starks, IndyCar’s vice president of promoter relations. “But we’re not going to give up on the street race concept altogether.”
IndyCar, whose domestic race sanction fees typically run between $1 million and $2 million annually, according to sources, recently instituted a request-for-qualification process that is designed to increase the amount of due diligence necessary before approving a new race. IndyCar is looking to release its 2017 and 2018 schedules as soon as August.
The new program was in the works before the Boston race, Starks said, but it nonetheless proved particularly prudent given the way the Boston situation played out.
“We’ve learned a lot of lessons about street races; there are almost too many to enumerate,” he said. “They’re high risks — there are a lot of obstacles that can keep an event from happening — but we want to make sure we are minimizing the risks.”
Jim Michaelian, longtime president and CEO of the Grand Prix Association of Long Beach that runs the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, the longest-running and most successful street race on the IndyCar circuit, said the key point that street race promoters and sanctioning bodies should keep in mind moving forward is the importance of the host city and promoter being on the same page from the start.
“The first prerequisite for a successful street race is a strong partnership with the host city — and that doesn’t necessarily mean a financial one,” Michaelian said. “Everything builds off of that, but until you have that, you really have two disparate groups there.”
