IndyCar must stop hibernating

Right at this moment, your correspondent is sitting in an apartment in San Francisco watching the 49ers creep towards an unexpected second-consecutive win on the trot. Consequently, I'm apparently a very small part of the reason why we're all mired in a five-month IndyCar hiatus.

At least, that's the logic that helped dictate the ultra-compressed 2014 IndyCar season; a format that will be carried on in 2015. Next year's schedule has the same number of race weekends (15), slightly fewer actual races (16 instead of 18; a by-product of the number of double-headers dropping from three to one), and almost exactly the same span across the calendar. The entire season will be contested in just 154 days, one more than this year.

And a big part of the reason for that is IndyCar's belief, championed first by a Boston Consulting Group report a couple of years ago and maintained by IndyCar parent company Hulman & Co's CEO Mark Miles, that it needs to avoid overlapping with the National Football League season at all costs.

The basis for all of this is unclear. Yes, the NFL is a juggernaut in the US: its TV average audience for a Sunday afternoon match is 65 times that of an IndyCar race. The gulf is so big as to make comparisons completely irrelevant.

So why does IndyCar bother? NASCAR certainly doesn't: despite its higher profile relative to IndyCar, it also pales against the NFL audience. And yet there were two NFL matches being broadcast here at the same time that Kevin Harvick was busy winning the Cup title on Sunday.

NASCAR is not bothered by NFL clashes © LAT

And even if the NFL were the problem, there are potentially other ways to side-step it. NFL matches are scheduled on Thursday and Monday nights, and Sundays. That leaves Fridays and Saturdays NFL-free, so would it be worth experimenting with more two-day race weekends?

The cost savings involved would be appreciated by the smaller teams, too.

In fairness, there was some indication during 2014 that the momentum generated by the manic schedule did generate a benefit. The series' TV numbers climbed substantially for the first time in eons, and while they are still south of where they need to be, an average increase of 34 per cent should be a source of pride in a year where both NASCAR and Formula 1's figures dipped.

The fear was always going to be how IndyCar would keep that momentum rolling through such a long winter. And so far, those concerns would appear to be well-founded. It lucked in with some early driver announcements - Simon Pagenaud to Penske, James Hinchcliffe to Schmidt, Jack Hawksworth to Foyt - but by and large it has fallen out of the global motorsport conversation.

Ironically, if ever there was a long IndyCar off-season that lent itself to storylines, it would be this one, due to the preparations for the arrival of manufacturer aero kits next year.

So far, though, even coverage of that has been strictly organic - some leaked spy shots of an early iteration of the Chevy kit, and a couple of AUTOSPORT stories featuring reactions from Chevrolet and, more recently, Helio Castroneves.

If the series has a formal PR plan in place to ensure visibility over the winter, we haven't seen the fruits of it yet. Hinch giving a house-music producer a ride in the two-seater doesn't count.

Maintaining the buzz through the off-season is all the more critical this time around because in 2015, the season will start with a flyaway. There's no reason to expect Brasilia to be anything other than a great event, and Sao Paolo proved that Brazil's appetite for IndyCar is strong. But starting the season off-shore after spending months in hibernation seems like a risk that the series doesn't really need to take.

That aside, there's actually quite a bit to like about the 2015 calendar. New Orleans looks like it will be fun, and it's to the credit of both IndyCar and the relevant race organisers that a solution was found to the date clash problem that almost knocked Toronto off the bill.

Houston will be absent from the calendar in 2015 © LAT

On the flipside, while it might sound unkind to suggest that a calendar is better for a specific event's absence, I'd propose that few in the paddock will be disappointed at not having to go to Houston in 2015.

For all of the energy that Mike Lanigan and his team put in, Houston was the wrong race at the wrong venue at the wrong time.

It's certainly not a loss of the magnitude that Baltimore was, although the fact that neither event survived longer than three years points to the difficulty in keeping new street races afloat.

And there are also still some questions to be answered, not least with regard to points. In 2014, IndyCar offered double points for its 500-milers at Indinapolis, Pocono and Fontana.

But Sonoma will take Fontana's place as the host of the curtain-closer next year, and a double-points format that works at a 500-mile oval race might not translate well to a shorter event on a road course.

IndyCar has spoiled us with great racing ever since the DW12 arrived three years ago, and I'd still argue that the on-track product is better than almost any other category on the planet. There's no reason to think that 2015 will be any different, unless one of the manufacturers gets its aero kit badly wrong.

The problem, as always, will be spreading the word beyond the confines of the faithful, and that's why IndyCar needs to do more now to keep itself on the radar. What's the point of an exciting new flyaway venue to open the season if nobody outside the choir notices?