What event has drawn sold out crowds daily, features a lot of big names in an extreme form of auto racing musical chairs, races on an oval, gets lots of press and even featured a viral video of a drunken cop slurring idiotic hate speech toward Tony Stewart? The same event IndyCar chose not to have anything to do with. The Chili Bowl is always a slice of real Americana but that connection eludes IMS.
Guess what else was sold out, held in New York City and broadcast nationally on CBS? Bull riding, a sport built from scratch by Randy Bernard. IndyCar had no use for him either.
The only form of the sport this year inducing inattention and yawns from John Q. Public is road racing.
Food for thought.
On another note certain to lead to a childish conniption episode or two from the handful of obsessed kids who stalk me around the internet I saw this blurb on the Chili Bowl site. I knew about Rico but the rest of those folks? And hey Chili Bowl, isn’t that less than politically correct?
What should they call the vehicles? How about ‘Little Cars?’ Or ‘Size Challenged Oval Propulsion Vehicles?’ Does not really have the same ring to it.
Racing is off to a rip roaring start (well, other than road racing).
Defender of IndyCar 
I always knew Rico was a great midget driver.
Hey, Defender, sure enjoyed you sparring with Oldfan and others in the comments section of this week’s “Miller’s Mailbag” on the Racer.com site…keep up the anger and venom and I am looking forward to another long season of accusations and finger pointing from us ‘men of a certain age’ about who is to blame for the sorry state of affairs in Indy Car today….on a related note, you are absolutely correct about not only Indy Car’s but the entire auto racing industry’s failure to connect with Millennials and the younger generation who, for whatever reason, find auto racing wasteful, boring and irrelevant….the few Millennials that I know treat the car as a utility to get them from point A to point B and are much more interested in vehicles with connectivity for their annoying devices and social media uplinks than HP or racing cred….I guess we only have ourselves to blame for taking sides in the open wheel war (although I attended about an equal amount of IRL vs. CART/Champ Car events between 1996 and 2008 and followed both on TV) and driving the few fans we had back in the day away to NASCAR and other forms of motorsport….now we are left with a niche sport with a dwindling fan base and less and less sponsors interested in ponying up to paint their name on the side pods….I will be at the season opener at Saint Pete, Phoenix and the 100th running of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing but will probably head over to the Old World for a few F1 events during the summer….
Actually, AMA Supercross motorcycle racing has drawn a total of 81,875 for its first 2 events for an average attendance of 40,937 per event.
(Two instances of off topic commentary relocated to comment section of 12/19/13 blog)
Midget racing…..that and sprint cars……the last of a real form of racing. Long may it remain and thrive.