IndyCar mustn't follow F1's example

Long-time IndyCar fans are very possessive when it comes to its heritage.

And they're correspondingly passionate participants in any conversation about IndyCar's future direction: there's a depth of emotional investment that you rarely see anywhere else in the sport, Formula 1 included.

That might be partly because F1 fans haven't had to endure the same type of ride as their IndyCar counterparts.

Despite years of warnings that F1 was walking a path towards tedium, it's only relatively recently that the world championship has really began to acknowledge it might be losing its way.

IndyCar has had great racing for years, but in every other respect its fans have been through the wringer more times than anyone can remember.

The particular brand of fundamentalism among IndyCar's hardliners is the result of natural selection: if you boil away the majority of a fanbase, as has happened in US single-seater racing over the past couple of decades, it's only the really gritty stuff that will be left at the bottom of the pot.

Series chief Mark Miles, pictured with Will Power, divides opinion © LAT

That gritty stuff is part of what has held American open-wheeler racing together despite a couple of concerted attempts to destroy itself during the past 20 years.

But if there's a point where the constant broadsides against the series' administration - over the calendar, over aero kits, over whatever - are going to become counterproductive, that moment is not far off.

Current boss Mark Miles is a very different animal to his predecessor Randy Bernard. The latter had an old-timey instinct for promotion and an open-door policy at his trailer on race weekends.

You could tease Randy about his cowboy belt. Miles doesn't wear a cowboy belt, and if he did, I'm not sure I have the level of familiarity required to tease him about it.

He's the classic archetype of a CEO. He has a nice leather folder that he carries stuff around in. Randy didn't have a nice leather folder.

The job of running a major sporting category is not one that you'd choose in the hope it would make you popular, and the intricacies specific to motorsport only amplify that all the more.

Nobody is ever going to be happy all the time, and I'd guess Miles views the criticism that comes his way as an occupational hazard.

Many fans pine for evocative ex-CART venues such as Road America © LAT

And to a degree, it is. But I'm starting to wonder whether some of it is misdirected.

Three or four years ago, one of the big concerns you'd hear in the paddock was that IndyCar didn't seem to have a long-term plan.

It does now: they told us all about it in Detroit three years ago when they first announced the aero kits. And pretty much everything Miles has done up to this point has been entirely consistent with that plan.

True, this season's condensed schedule is dumb, and it was good to hear him say recently that it won't be repeated next year.

Miles's fixation on Labor Day (the first weekend in September) as the optimum weekend for closing the championship still divides the paddock, but whether you agree with him or not, at least he can justify his position: it's designed to maximise the series' potential to grow its TV audience, which is one of IndyCar's fundamental problems. It's on Miles to make it work, but at least there's a rationale.

It's a similar deal when you consider the venues that make up the calendar itself: if you and I had a dollar for every time someone's grand idea to revitalise IndyCar was to take the cars back to Road America/Laguna Seca/Phoenix/wherever, we could afford to buy all of those tracks and promote the races ourselves.

These are not new ideas. ("I think some people believe that we've never heard of Road America," Miles told AUTOSPORT at Fontana a couple of weeks ago). Those tracks are off the schedule for a reason, and if plans to bring a couple of them back bear fruit, great. If not, then it's time to move on.

Indeed, the one mistake a lot of the more vocal critics make is thinking that any of the ideas that they are putting onto the table are new.

For a long time I believed one of the easiest moves for cost-saving would be to cut more of the race weekends from three days to two; a chat with someone who works for IndyCar a couple of weeks ago revealed that that idea is often raised internally, but that it always meets resistance from promoters.

Not many turned up to watch the wild Fontana race in person © LAT

IndyCar is not infallible. While I appreciate how difficult it must be to pull a schedule together, I still don't see how there could have been any happy ending to any scheme that involves a daytime Fontana race in the middle of summer.

Fontana is basically in the desert. The grandstands are not covered. It takes a very special breed of fan to go and sit out there for three or four hours. And a very rare breed, based on this year's crowd.

Of course, like all smartypants outsiders, I have a solution for Fontana's plight. IndyCar is looking to start its season earlier but is struggling to find venues in the US with a climate conducive to racing in February. Fontana's weather is relatively pleasant at that time of year, and I can't think of a more brand-appropriate way for an IndyCar season to open than with a 500-miler on a superspeedway.

OK, so, there's the risk that you'd open your season in front of 5000 fans. But I'm also sure that this idea has already been raised within IndyCar's walls a thousand times already, and that there's an excellent reason for it not to work that I've completely missed.

Aero kits remain another sticking point. It's absolutely fair to throw darts at IndyCar for the way the rollout of the kits was handled, especially with regard to the ovals. But after years of everyone screaming for more technical diversity, why isn't there more appreciation for the fact that we now have it?

Almost all of the missiles fired at IndyCar HQ from web forums and opinion columns come from a place of heartfelt sincerity. These people bellowing that Miles doesn't know what he's doing, do so from a deep desire to help the series.

A time machine back to 1995 and the 'pre-split' era is not available © LAT

In a lot of ways, IndyCar fans have it better than pretty much every other racing fan on the planet: the drivers are top-class, the competition fierce, the racing is exciting and, for the most part, uncontrived.

A lot of other championships would kill for that, and it's perhaps IndyCar's greatest failing of all that regardless of the regime, it doesn't seem to be able to get that message out.

Regardless, no amount of sniping is going to move things forward one inch.

It's not going to transport the paddock back to the glory years of CART. There's no Delorean that can take you back in time and give you the opportunity to change the course of history by preventing Tony George from taking charge of Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Michael Andretti's mullet is, in all likelihood, gone for good. Looking to history to 'save' IndyCar is like hinging F1's future on a comeback by Alain Prost.

And constantly blasting Miles isn't going to solve anything either. He's not a 'racing guy'. Neither was Randy.

And if it's true that the current IndyCar administration could do with a streak of Bernard's energy and inspiration, it's also true that there appears to be more focus and a clearer roadmap in place than there was three years ago.

As long as IndyCar creates situations such as the aero kit superspeedway debacle, it will be fair game for criticism.

But occasionally, it would be nice to see the series get more credit for the things it does right.