How IndyCar's CEO ended its 20-year skid and saved an American icon:
ark Miles isn’t an IndyCar champion. He hasn’t won the Indianapolis 500. In fact, he’s never even raced competitively. But following him around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway ahead of the 103rd running of the Indy 500 this Sunday, you would have thought he was one of the sport’s biggest stars. Even during a practice session, Miles was hailed by team members, approached for autographs and cheered from a sparsely populated grandstand.
What has since become known as The Split fractured the sport’s fanbase and forced team owners to choose sides, in the process creating a vacuum readily filled by Nascar, the once-regional stock car series that quickly became the nation’s most popular motorsports promotion. An IPO couldn’t save CART from dwindling viewership and defecting teams; the seriesin 2003 and later returned as Champ Car. IRL wasn’t faring much better, with that season’s Indy 500 drawing just 6.7 million viewers.
He also quickly reversed IndyCar’s double-header strategy, leaving just a single double-header on the current 17-race schedule, in Detroit. The original logic had been to increase efficiency by running races on consecutive days at the same track, thus minimizing team travel and spreading race coverage over a full weekend. But Miles pushed IndyCar to sacrifice some of that efficiency to reach more fans by holding races in a greater number of markets.
Team sponsorships may never return to the heyday of the early 1990s: Ganassi notes that brands today want more for their money than just a logo on a car and are reluctant to commit to long-term deals, with the once-standard five-year partnerships being replaced by three-year contracts. But they remain the lifeblood of the sport, particularly for lower-end teams.
If television promotion was the goal, then Miles and his team were likely popping milk bottles with this year’s new NBC deal.
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