Long Beach newspaper backs IndyCar
Formula One in Long Beach? No reason to replace current profitable IndyCar platform.
At a Long Beach Century Club meeting last week, Chris Pook, the man who brought Grand Prix racing to our city in the 1970s, made the pitch to replace the current Long Beach Grand Prix IndyCar race with Formula One, according to a Register report.
The present contract held by the Grand Prix Association of Long Beach, which operates the race in association with IndyCar, is up for renewal in 2015, and Mr.
Pook hopes the City Council will open up the bidding process to seek proposals from other racing bodies.
Both IndyCar and F1 events race similar single-seat openwheeled cars. American-based IndyCar races, like the prestigious Indianapolis 500, tend to have more circular tracks, emphasizing speed, while the European-owned F1 has races that generally zigzag on tighter circuits or through city streets.
Mr. Pook claims he can extend the Long Beach track to meet F1 standards for $9.2 million, and intends to build garages and a two-story building on Shoreline Drive to house luxury suites and race operations – all to be paid by the promoter. He claims that F1 will bring a larger audience and higher revenues from TV rights, which will in turn deliver a larger economic windfall to the city. All this would come at no additional cost to Long Beach.
Certainly, Mr. Pook’s proposal seems enticing, and with F1 averaging over 20 million global viewers per race, at locations all around the world, the motorsport could bring an international appeal to the International City.
However, when things seem too good to be true, they almost always are and the financial sure bet being offered, that has been questioned by industry observers, seems too good to be true.
After all, Mr. Pook has pointed to the success of the recent F1 race in Austin – currently the only F1 event in the nation – which drew large crowds and strong revenues for the city and state.
But the Austin city council had to sponsor the event to the tune of a $25 million per year subsidy, paid out of a state fund.
A similar effort to bring F1 racing to New Jersey has failed every year since 2011, officially due to financial difficulties. In 2012, automotive publication Autoweek provided an unofficial reason: “Not enough money has been raised to pay the fee, rumored to be around $30 million per year." In fact, The Grand Prix of Long Beach started as a Formula One race, but left the body in 1983 due to high costs, eventually finding its way to IndyCar, which is understood to have a substantially lower license fee that is paid by promoters, without city support.
But, even if Mr. Pook’s math adds up, there are a series of unknowns, like getting approval from the notoriously restrictive Coastal Commission for his building plans, that haven’t been addressed.
In all, there are just too many assumptions for these editorial pages to support the wild-eyed plan, especially when measured against a perfectly profitable and popular racing platform that Long Beach already has in IndyCar.
Until facts are clearer and guarantees are made, Long Beach should stick with the 30-year partner it has rather than risking the city’s single biggest, and largely hassle-free, event on the prospects of a bigger purse.