Originally Posted by midmad68:
reading this post it made me appreciate the fan base here on the west coast. last saturday at perris there was certainly a respectible crowd dispite the low car count. the fans did get to see some great racing with only a few cars getting tore up. the thing that i love about perris is the fact that a lot of the divers do stick around afterward until well after the lights go out. from where we were pitted, i could look both ways and still see Jones, Sheridan, Kruseman, Hansen, Spencer, etc. still lingering around with dozens of fans just talking. i've noticed that when these fans come into the pits to chat they know the driver by name, and the drivers know many of their fans by name. one thing that i think perris does well is that they let the fans into the pits immediately after the last car has left the track and the top three have stopped on the front straight. everyone has to walk past the top three cars on thier way into the pits.
just a few things i noticed...
MJ
I Don't know what support series you have out West, but in the Midwest we have anywhere from one to five. While they often run the sprint feature first (thank you for that), and you can't get in the pits until all series have run their respective feature. The sprint teams have left by then. So no fan interaction with the sprint drivers and crews. People say to me "Well, then get a pit pass". That may be a good suggestion, unless you have enough trouble scraping the $$$ together for an admission ticket and gasoline, let alone a pit pass.
So what's the answer? I don't know.It's been talked about here many times and the answer seems to be not so easy. It depends on who's doing the asking and who is doing the answering. In a perfect world of the sprint car fan, get rid of the support stuff. The rest will take care of itself. But in the real world, that is not practical.
This IOW site is usually slanted toward the "insiders" point of view and not the fans. The fan almost seems like the red-headed step child around here at times IMO. I think all racing people need to listen to us fans. You need us as much (or more) than we want you.