Walker: Getting fans “re-ignited” is IndyCar’s biggest challenge

If Derrick Walker wants to get fans excited about IndyCars again, he can start by getting them to scream like an F1 car. Sound is the #1 sensory stimulation in motorsports. The new underpowered IndyCars are too quiet and uninspiring. The #2 sensory stimulation is visual. The current IndyCar is Butt Ugly. AR1.com predicted the ugly new car would drive fans away and it has. Enough said.

Five years after open-wheel racing unified in North America, the IZOD IndyCar Series continues to face a uphill climb in regards to growing its mainstream presence. The split between the series (then known as the Indy Racing League) and Champ Car that lasted from 1996 to 2008 had a disastrous impact on the sport, causing many longtime fans to abandon it and helping to accelerate NASCAR’s rise to prominence as the country’s most popular form of racing.

Not that everything is grim for IndyCar, which boasts a diverse driver grid and schedule of tracks as well as perhaps the best racing product in the whole of motorsports today. But Derrick Walker, the sport’s new head of racing competition, realizes that many challenges are still to be contended with — and getting the fans back is the biggest one of all.

“There are a number of challenges and I’m not sure if there’s any one ahead of the others, but if I had to pick one, I’d say the biggest challenge we’ve got is to get the fans re-ignited with what we’re doing," Walker said in an interview with NBC Sports Network’s Marty Snider during this afternoon’s Bump Day proceedings.

"We need to appeal to a bigger fan base and we’ve got to get some of those fans who have gone off to some other sport or have choices that they didn’t have before and now have them — they don’t all tune in when we want them, so we’ve got to find a way to connect with the fans…We're charged with that responsibility: Get the fans back."

As for his potential impact on the series’ current relationship with its teams, Walker hopes to have more positive dialogue with them as well as the entirety of the sport’s partners. The sport’s off-track headlines have sometimes had a tendency to overshadow positives achieved on the track, and Walker recognizes that such a situation can’t exist going forward.

"The team owners have not felt the love, shall we say, for a number of years," said Walker, who is still the team manager for "500″ pole sitter Ed Carpenter's squad through the month of May. "So hopefully I can bridge that gap…We can’t do it in a vacuum. We've got to be all together and we've got to get behind a common purpose, a common goal.

"That’s what the fans want. They don’t want us to be out there duking it out while they’re losing interest. They want us all together — unite the series across the board." NBC Sports