Is IndyCar out of the wilderness?

The IndyCar Series has stood on the precipice. At the dawn of the 2012 season, it was preparing for a year that was make or break in a very real sense: wounds were still raw from the catastrophic Las Vegas event a few months earlier; four ovals had withdrawn from the schedule; the paddock was rife with political bickering; the judicial system was being lambasted; domestic TV figures barely registered.

There were also concerns about the fact that the new Dallara DW12 looked like an optimised hippopotamus; yet this car proved to be one of the main reasons that the series has successfully navigated its way through a period of stabilisation. Ugly as it looked, the DW12 raced majestically on road/street courses and ovals alike. There have been 52 races during the DW12 era, and maybe four of those were duds.

On the eve of the 2015 season, much has changed. Former series CEO Randy Bernard was replaced by Mark Miles, who was then a board member of IndyCar and IMS parent company Hulman & Co, and is now its CEO. Derrick Walker transitioned from team management to a series-management role and overhauled race control.

The paddock is more unified and more TV viewers are tuning in. The previous, disengaged title sponsor has given way to a blue-chip company in Verizon that is aggressively activating its association with a sport that was in danger of being relegated to America's sporting fringe.

Nobody is under the illusion that IndyCar is out of the woods, but there's a distinct sense the trees are thinning.

Returned to Brazil was cancelled at the last minute, but IndyCar sees the expansion as important © LAT

"I'm very pleased with our progress over the past couple of years," says Miles. "IndyCar had a terrific year from 2013 to 2014 in terms of our television audience. The average viewership increased by 25 per cent. The average rating increased by 25 per cent. And this is at a time when it's not natural law that sports ratings are increasing, so that is a significant achievement. It's starting from a low base, and we aspire to grow that television audience meaningfully."

Miles is correct that IndyCar's ratings were low-hanging fruit, but he's also right to be pleased: IndyCar's dramatic spike came in a year when both NASCAR and Formula 1's American TV figures shrank. Other aspects of the series' improved health are less easily measured by metrics, but are significant nonetheless.

"We still need to grow our economy, but I think the stakeholder confidence is in a much happier place," Miles says. "People know what we're trying to do and why we're trying to do it, and even if they don't agree with it, they've given us the benefit of the doubt, and they trust us.

"Related to this is the paddock confidence. A couple of years ago there were concerns about how good we were as a sanctioning body: the basic 'making and enforcing rules' stuff. This is more difficult to gauge - although we do survey stakeholders, in addition to talking to them regularly - but I think we've moved up several notches in terms of the credibility as a sanctioning body.

"And for the most part, we got race control out of the newspapers last year. That's what you hope for. It will happen, because it is a sport, it's officiating, and there are controversies. Sometimes, even mistakes are made.

Montoya's victorious return does not necessarily mean the series is weak on driver quality © LAT

"But we've spent a lot of money to improve the technology. Derrick changed the system to create clearer standards for what penalties will be levied when there are infractions; he created a communications process post-race so that teams and drivers and come in and see the people who made the decisions and the videos that were available to race control.

"That doesn't always mean that they were delighted, but the communication was good, and they know why we did what we did, and I think that's foundational."

The sceptic - and after such a tumultuous recent history, IndyCar still has many - will immediately point to the Brazil-sized elephant in the room. Last year's schedule was the first step in IndyCar's broader plan to begin and end its season earlier, and the rollout of that idea took the form of a calendar that ended in early August.

Having the 2015 season begin in March resulted in an off-season that was almost as long as the season itself, which is a massive risk for a series that was finally gaining momentum. Few North American venues are located in climates suitable for racing in February, which prompted Miles' controversial plan to plug the gap by expanding internationally.

The plan was for this new phase of international expansion to start in a market that IndyCar is already familiar with: Brazil. IndyCar raced on a street circuit in Sao Paolo between 2010 and 2013; this year it was supposed to open its season with a race in Brasilia. That event was cancelled with just a few weeks' notice after the regional government withdrew its funding.

Miles says that he was "angry and bitterly disappointed" that the race collapsed so late, but points out that it was on track to be a success, with title and presenting sponsorships having been secured, hospitality suites having sold out, and around 25,000 tickets having been sold at the time the event was canned.

2014 was another step forward, but the season ended nearly seven months ago © LAT

It's the second international IndyCar race to have fallen over in recent times, following on three years after the scrapped race in Qingdao, China. Tempting as it is to draw parallels however, the circumstances were quite different in each case.

All signs point to Qingdao as an example of the potential pitfalls that accompany dealing with relatively inexperienced motorsport promoters in emerging markets. The Brasilia promoters, however, were the same group that had successfully run the Sao Paolo event.

Brasilia's cancellation lengthened an off-season that was already too long, but this was actually an additional form of insurance in itself. Miles's reasoning was that it's less disruptive to lose a race at the very start of the year than to create an unwanted gap by losing one in the middle. For all of the disappointment though, his commitment to international expansion remains unwavering.

"People - Americans in particular - tend to forget that American races fall over too, for economic reasons, for political reasons, for all kinds of reasons," he says. "The schedule today isn't the schedule of CART 20 years ago. And it will always be somewhat dynamic.

"Bernie Ecclestone and others have done quite well, at least economically, and I would argue also in terms of growing their fan base, by being international. So the idea that Americans can't do business outside the US because people aren't trustworthy and you can't live by the rule of law; you can't make contracts you can depend on. Sure, there will be issues. But there are plenty of examples of it working."

As strongly as Miles advocates IndyCar's international expansion, he does not think it is critical to the series' future.

"We can pursue the approach of moving earlier and expanding the number of races, even if every race was in North America," he says. "But there is a market opportunity internationally that is greater, perhaps, than it is typically in the States. So I think we would continue to grow, but we would grow somewhat more slowly."

Despite the delayed start, there is reason for optimism about IndyCar 2015 © LAT

And what of the product that he's trying to sell? The standard of racing has spoken for itself, but for those looking through an F1 lens, it's easy to underestimate the standard of drivers.

Attributing Juan Pablo Montoya's successful comeback to poor-quality opposition does a massive disservice not only to the level of talent on the IndyCar grid, but also to the considerable work that both Montoya and those at Penske put in to get him to the point where he could secure his win at Pocono. If IndyCar were easy, Rubens Barrichello would have won races.

The ratio of paid drivers to paying ones is probably not all that different to that in F1, and the standard of drivers who are buying their way into the sport is generally similar in both cases.

The reason that less-fancied entries can shine in IndyCar in a way that their F1 counterparts cannot is the element of mechanical supremacy is eliminated. Will Power does not automatically have a two-second-per-lap buffer over the backmarkers that the leading F1 teams enjoy.

Each tenth is made to count, and any tiny shortcoming in racecraft or set-up will be punished. One of Bernard's legacies is the elimination of the Milka Duno from the IndyCar grid, and the current field is as strong as it has ever been.

It's Miles's job to sound bullish about IndyCar's future but, finally, there is cause for optimism - reason to believe that its prospects are bright.

The product is good. The numbers are up. The paddock is calm. Of course, it wouldn't be IndyCar if there wasn't something to be concerned about, and any impact of six months' winter dormancy on the momentum with which the series finished 2014 remains to be seen.

There's also the threat of whether the performance increases promised by the much-vaunted manufacturer aero kits will come at a cost to the quality of racing. But IndyCar has faced, and survived, far worse.