The 2015 IndyCar season opens in a little over a month in St. Petersburg. During the annual IndyCar Media Day, Sportsnet sat down for an exclusive interview with IndyCar CEO Mark Miles about a number of issues and things to look for this season in the series.
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Sportsnet: There’s always excitement at the start of a new IndyCar season. This year, with a new race in New Orleans and new aero kits for the cars, there’s even more reason to be anxious for a new season. What are some of the things fans have to look forward to?
Mark Miles: We’re going to be in New Orleans for the first time and there’s been some testing down there. I had a chance to talk to some of the drivers that have tested and they’re really stoked about it.
The aero kits are sort of the elephant in the room, we’re sure that it’s going to add to performance and for those of us that are laymen that means speed. The cars are going to look different and they will perform differently, but I think the common denominator is going to be speed.
We’re really happy about the growth in our audience. The television growth has been terrific in Canada and in the States, which is kind of our core markets and the social and digital growth has been outstanding, the IndyCar nation is growing and we’re looking forward to extending that trend in 2015.
SN: Some of the reasons for that growth are changes to the month of May here at Indianapolis. Where do you see further momentum being built in the series?
MM: Indianapolis is kind of the crown jewel and some think that we think of it as Indy, but we think of it as the crown jewel of IndyCar. I think this year it’s the new market and I have to confess that it’s hard for us not to peek ahead a year to 2016 and as you know is the 100th Indianapolis 500 mile race and we see that as a chance to re-establish our roots internationally.
SN: The series was supposed to open in Brazil in early March. Unfortunately, that race was cancelled by a government decision. How frustrating was that?
MM: We were not pleased at all, we were angry. The race for fans was already clearly established as a success; all the suites and hospitality were sold; ticket sales were great; the title sponsor presenting; everything was in place; the fans had bought most of the tickets and then there’s a political governmental thing and there’s a, from our point of view, inappropriate and arbitrary decision from one day to the next to cancel it.
The construction equipment that had done two-thirds of the improvements to the track were pulled off with a month to go. So I think that was really short sighted.
But it doesn’t say much to us about the idea of adding a few additional international races. We think there’s a market there at the beginning of our championship. We’ve tried to make our strategy more clearly understood, we’re not interested in shortening the season, we want to end it on the U.S. Labour Day weekend, but start it earlier.
So our goal by ’16 and ’17 is to get to 20 races over seven months, covering some of eight months on the calendar, a really full program. So some of that may include international races at the beginning of the year.
SN: Might the growth of the calendar include another Canadian event? There’s been talk of meetings in Calgary, anything you’d like to announce now?
MM: (Laughs) I don’t have anything to announce today, but there have been some discussions about the appetite for more IndyCar racing maybe in Western Canada and we think that’s a really intriguing proposition. The possibility of getting just the right set of partners together to develop or redevelop an IndyCar market in a big part of North America and Canada is an exciting possibility, but a little early to make any announcements.
SN: The difficulty with adjusting the calendar is there are other ramifications. There’s also been the suggestion of returning to Elkhart Lake or other great venues from the past but there’s a lot of pieces that need to line up before you make such a decision.
MM: You know scheduling for any league is complicated and there are a lot of dominoes and everything is interconnected. If you change this it’s going to affect three or four other things so it isn’t easy.
People seem to think that if somebody wants a race you just add a race and it’s just not that easy. Our objective, as I said, is getting to 20 races. We’ll have 16 in 2015 as part of the championship. We clearly want to add a new event on the Labour Day weekend as the finale. And that leaves you with three, basically in that February, early March opportunity.
So really the possibility of adding new events in new markets other than that February early March period, pretty much relates to whether there are existing races that we might trade out. And that isn’t really our philosophy. It’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but we will look at being in the best markets with the most vibrant races, but we wouldn’t do that arbitrarily.
SN: Another example of the difficulty of scheduling is the Toronto race having to be moved forward a month due to outside influences, namely the Pan Am Games. Everyone in the series had to adjust to keep that event on the schedule.
MM: That was difficult and it speaks volumes about how the IndyCar Nation, so to speak, the paddock, and we feel about the race in Canada, in Toronto.
A lot of things had to move and we got questions today about, do we really value date equity if we’re willing to move things around as we did. And the answer in principal is yes we want date equity but we also value our great promoters and our great events. We made the necessary changes and expect things will probably revert to form after 2015.
SN: Recently there were stories speculating on the health of IndyCar and IndyCar’s financial stability. Can you address that speculation?
MM: My shorter answer to that question or that assertion is rubbish. Wherever it came from it came from people that don’t know our economics; we’re in really good shape.
We’ve had consecutive good years — we’re growing. We signed Verizon, Angie’s List and other major sponsors in 2014 that are ongoing, and we’ll be announcing three new sponsors in the next at least month that are signed and just a matter of the timing of introducing them publicly.
As has been discussed already today there’s a bit of a cue of places that want to have, want to host our racing and our audience numbers across the board are going up so we’ve got a lot of work to do to get where we want to be but we’re in a good place and we’re making progress and there is absolutely no issue around the fiscal health of IndyCar.
SN: Is that your biggest challenge, showing the exciting on-track racing to a larger audience and being at the right venues?
MM: It’s not one thing. The one thing is growing the fan base, but you don’t do that by simply making changes, everything matters. You don’t do it by simply changing one city for another, or one market for another. You’ve got to improve your television audience; that has to do with scheduling and continuity among broadcasters, an issue we don’t happily have in Canada, but is an issue in the States.
It has to do with the way we go to market, the way we approach younger fans, so we’re getting better all the time at digital and social marketing and the numbers are responding. It has to do with us working with our drivers to make sure that they’re better known. That’s a really hard thing, there’s a lot of competition for eyeballs out there, but we love our paddock. Our drivers, I think, are incredibly appealing. They’re great spokespersons, they’re hard-nosed competitors, enormous skill, they’ve got it all. We’ve just got to help them get that across to the public.