A crowd of about 50,000, mediocre by NASCAR standards, turned out for the Goody's 500 on a drizzly, 40-degree Sunday in Martinsville, Va.
But the newly reunited Indy-car tour drew worse in its debut at Homestead-Miami Speedway, despite higher temperatures and better weather. Saturday night's Gainsco Indy 300 drew maybe 35,000, according to The Miami Herald, or less according to veteran Indy-car journalists.
So the Indy-car world is finally unified again, after 14 years of bickering by some who have done their best -- and maybe succeeded -- in all but killing off what was once the most popular motor-sports series in the country.
Tony George, who runs Indianapolis Motor Speedway, was right to wrestle control of Indy-car racing from the wealthy car owners who were not concerned with the best interests of the sport. He tried to be diplomatically correct for a while, but he finally just pulled the trigger.
The Indy Racing League should have succeeded. George did a lot of good things. But when Toyota and Honda ran General Motors out of the sport, and the Indy-car game began being dominated again by big dollars and selfish interests, things started going downhill fast.
NASCAR men, curiously perhaps, weren't quite able to help George turn things around, so NASCAR's Nationwide series passed Indy cars as the second-most popular motor-sports series in the country.
Now that Indy-car racing is united again, should NASCAR brace for new competition in sponsorship, marketing and TV ratings?
Maybe not.
Despite giddiness in the stock-car garage among aficionados glad to have some sanity back in Indy-car racing, George and his new IRL have a long way to go to catch back up. Some predict that Indy-car racing will be back atop the American sports psyche in five years. If so, it would take an almost complete collapse of what NASCAR has built.
Some points to consider:
-- NASCAR insiders -- the Frances and Bruton Smith -- own virtually all the major U.S. racetracks. So George would need their help to make his new plan work. And with NASCAR running three major national touring series, how much room is left on the calendar for the IRL?
-- NASCAR's marketing machine has blanketed the country in nearly every major market and has locked up nearly every significant sponsor interested in marketing through motor sports. It is also at least 10 years more "mature" than the Indy-car operation and has remarkable depth.
-- NASCAR has an incredible amount of racing inventory -- 38 Sprint Cup races, 35 Nationwide races and 25 Truck races, all spread out from early February through late November.
-- Many Indy-car stars have defected to NASCAR. Sam Hornish Jr., the 2006 Indy 500 winner, and Dario Franchitti, the 2007 Indy 500 winner, were at Martinsville on Sunday, struggling but seemingly satisfied to be where the big money and big interest really are. And of course there are Tony Stewart and others who might be in Indy-car racing if things hadn't fallen apart.
To help bankroll his new series 14 years ago, George invited NASCAR to the Brickyard. In the years since, NASCAR's Brickyard 400 has become possibly a bigger race than the Indy 500. And Sprint Cup has become the top racing series in the U.S.
NASCAR has the support of the world's three biggest carmakers -- General Motors, Ford and Toyota -- as well as Chrysler. Honda has Indy-car racing to itself, now that Toyota, GM and Ford have all quit.
Still, one of the marketing lines heard at Martinsville is that the newly revived Indy-car tour should help keep NASCAR executives on their toes, particularly in the area of budget costs, and especially in the Nationwide tour, which is struggling.
Geoff Smith, the head of Roush Racing and the man who runs Jack Roush's vast sponsorship-marketing arm, said that NASCAR has done well recruiting sponsors for the Truck, Nationwide and Sprint Cup series.
"When you see the U.S. economy go soft, the lack of (marketing) infrastructure in many of these race teams starts to show up. Whether it's the IRL or in the NASCAR garage, I can't tell you how many teams spend their time trying to raid our sponsors rather than working to find new ones.
"The guys at the very top (Roush, Rick Hendrick, Richard Childress, Joe Gibbs) can get their sponsors by waiting for the phone to ring. But that doesn't go very deep into this Cup series, or the Nationwide series or Truck series. You have to have a marketing arm out there continuously mining for sponsors."
Smith said that those in Indy-car racing are "going to try to create a new dynamic, to improve the quality of their show ... and that's what they'll have to do to attract sponsors. We all have to understand what the competition is at a particular price point."
If those in Indy-car are trying to undercut and under-price those in NASCAR for sponsors, it could show just how exorbitantly expensive NASCAR racing really is. Indy-car officials might be able to make a case -- if they work hard enough -- that their series offers more bang for the buck.
Smith sees it differently:
"In terms of a cost advantage, the Indy-car tour has so many fewer races that there ought to be some price benefit there," Smith says.
"But we're out there 35 times a year in the Nationwide series, and that's twice as many races as Indy car ... which means NASCAR has twice as much reach nationally and geographically, which allows a sponsor to have a full-year national platform they can roll out week after week."
Smith said that the IRL has a vision that the technology and costs have to be organized in a way that will allow potential owners to know the costs.
"But this is just a start for the IRL ... and we (in NASCAR) have inherent competitive advantages in the marketplace: with the number of races we have, the length of our seasons, the number of markets we reach, the geographical reach we have -- and in our pricing for what we can deliver ...'
"So the new IRL might be a complement for us ... but I don't think it's threatening us in any way."
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