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TV is not the end-all-be-all on this topic. Would it be great and help? Of course it would. It would be great for us race fans that can’t make it to all events, but first you have to make a product attractive enough for a network to take on….or be able to sell sponsorship to take care of the cost of buying TV time. Right now neither of those is an option….on a big scale. You have to work on the product first and then TV will come. TV is an easy sell for people on here. Problem is there are not enough of us who love it. So, it’s hard to get on TV as such a niche. Most of my non race friends think that racing is Nascar because that is what they see on TV. I have to explain what an open wheel car even is because they have no idea. TV should be the last piece of the puzzle, not the first IMO.
The main thing right now is that it costs too much to run pavement to justify the means to do so for most teams. You can’t buy a pavement car and go run “local” with it. So if you can only run it a few times a year, why buy one? When you do run the car, again, it costs too much to do so. I realize it is going to cost money to race. Seems that the tire bill alone is one major thing that kills the car counts. That is the first step that should be taken. I know the bigger teams will spend what they want to, but something needs to be done so you don’t “need” a new set of tires every time you hit the track. This goes for midgets too. I have heard several teams’ reason for skipping a pavement race is that the tire bill is just too large. To me, that seems like an easy fix. Bottom line is that the cost to race pavement needs to come more in line with dirt or it will never take off again. You can build your own dirt car if you want to. You might not be able to compete with the big boys, but you can be in the game. Pavement racing does not work that way because it does not make sense to build one (hard to compete with a Beast anyway) that you can only run a few times a year…..when you do it costs so much more. Something has to be done to bring the cost down or the count will continue to dwindle. A car that can run both would be good, but you don’t want to cause the same problem on the dirt side. You don’t want “local” drivers to have to have a different car on dirt than they can run now. Then you are transferring the problem to the dirt. Any way the current dirt cars could be run on pavement with some modifications you could add on (then take off when going back to dirt)? I know that is not ideal and they would not be as good of a pavement car, but anybody that wanted to run could. I don't know if that would be possible as I don't know the mechanics of it. The problem then becomes what do you do with current pavement cars that would obviously be a better car? Really tough situation to change and make all sides happy.
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